The Best Show That No One Watched

There's a great, great television show out there that has already come and gone, under the radar - one that not a single person in your telephone's contact list has probably ever even heard of. There are plenty of TV Series' that don't find the audience they deserve (think Firefly, Sports Night and Fringe), or only find critical praise when looked upon after the fact (think The Wire, Friday Night Lights, and Pushing Daisies), but Flashpoint survived for five of the most consistently quality seasons on Cable TV while bouncing around in obscurity once airing on CTV, then CBS, and eventually on ION Television. It is a show that never getting any of the recognition that it truly deserved.

As Flashpoint releases its Final Season on DVD, it's impossible not to look back at the show, as a whole, and appreciate its ability to take the best aspects of all of the shows that most people DO watch and blend them into an hour-long, emotional thrill ride each and every week. Think the science and technology of a CSI: Crime Scene Investigation mixed with the intensity and suspense of a 24 mixed with the “weight of the world on your shoulders” feel of Blue Bloods, but then add a very unique extra element that takes the show to the next level. Take said elements from some of those better written, acted, and produced shows on television, then add the dynamic that a “bad guy” isn't really a bad guy and now you have a roller coaster of a ride both intense and emotionally draining.

Team One, as they are referred to in the show, is an elite Strategic Response Unit (SWAT-like) task force that deals with crisis situations – mostly hostage negotiations, but also the occasional bomb threat, shooter terrorizing the city, child abduction, or suicide attempt – and the show focuses mainly on the case of the week without bringing too much of the character's personal lives into the matter, ala the early days of The X-Files. The difference here is that each “subject” is not necessarily an evil-doer or villain, and in the majority of the cases the culprit and/or situation isn't all that it or he appears to be when the team gets the call. Within the first few episodes of the very first season, Flashpoint made it clear that it wasn't always going to have a happy ending. First, Ed Lane (High Dillon) had to shoot (via sniper) and kill a man who was a danger to others in the middle of a courtyard, right in front of his teenage son. Next, Team One had to talk down a subject in a hospital waiving a gun around and holding a surgeon hostage, but all that he wanted was to get a new heart for his daughter who had taken a turn for the worse after she was removed from the transplant list at the beginning of the episode. A couple of weeks later, it's a shootout in the mall, but the subject is a troubled girl who snapped after being bullied and was ready to leap from the roof of the building as the SRU tries to talk her down.

What Flashpoint does as well as anyone on television, is humanize these stories. It makes them something you can relate to, if not sympathize with. The SRU Team, led by Greg Parker (Enrico Colantoni) and Lane, bring a humility to these situations as their first goal is to relate to the subject and avoid any further unnecessary violence. Naturally, this doesn't always work and Team One's bottom line is to shoot to kill, not wound, when the circumstance reaches that point. But it's the aftermath that is what usually tugs at the heart-strings. If it isn't one of those weeks when one of the SRU members are struggling with the life they took or the righteousness of the subject they took down, then it could be the empathy a viewer could feel for one of the many subjects. The show continually drums up the age-old notion that the “road to hell was paved with good intentions”, then twists it, chews it up, and spits it back out in the context of that week's crisis. And just to tie all of the emotion up with a little bow, the producers and directors choose a melancholy, lyric-appropriate song for a heavy montage at the end of each and every episode.

If, and it is a big if, there was one episode that put all of the best aspects of the show together for one hour, it would have to be the Season Premiere to Flashpoint's last season, “Broken Peace”. It begins with the end of the story, as all but a few episodes do, where we see an abusive ex-husband holding a gun to the former wife's head and then it spins back to hours before where we learn that the daughter has managed to stay away from her father for quite some time. The father wants to see his daughter and grabs the mother while the SRU team scoops up the daughter so that she can help talk the aggressor down. Team One does their background investigation and uncovers the rest of the story and how much hate the daughter has for the father, but of course not until she is standing on the same rooftop screaming at her father that still has the gun to her mother's head. Ed Lane, with his sniper rifle, has the father lined up for the “kill shot”, and with the daughter screaming and the father coming down from his escalation, the daughter pulls a weapon out of her bag and rushes across the rooftop towards the father. Lane has no choice but to reclassify the daughter as the danger and as she shows no sign of calming, is given the “Scorpio” command to take the shot. Cue the aforementioned roller coaster of emotions, the intensity of the situation, the fact that the subject is not a “bad” person, and the weight of what Lane and the Team had to do and you've got a taste of what this show was. Well, at least what it was to the few people that were lucky enough to catch it while it was on.