THE new fall television season brings a healthy influx of Hollywood crime series that are being praised for pushing the boundaries of TV drama. According to advance reviews, shows such as The Shield, Boomtown, CSI: Miami and Robbery Homicide Division are breaking ground with more complex characters and unconventional story structures. So how does a venerable Canadian program such as Da Vinci’s Inquest, leading all dramas with 10 Gemini nominations including best dramatic series, keep up with this raised bar?

‘We always liked to think we raised the bar to begin with,’ says Alan DiFiore, Da Vinci’s head writer along with Frank Borg and series creator, executive producer and sometimes director Chris Haddock. The triumvirate is nominated in the best writing category for two scripts from its fourth season, ‘Pretend You Didn’t See Me’ and ‘Ugly Quick.’

‘We’ve been trying to move into those directions since day one, to see where we could go with the kind of material you’re beginning to see more of,’ DiFiore adds.

Da Vinci’s Inquest, produced by Vancouver’s Haddock Entertainment and Toronto’s Barna-Alper Productions, follows the investigations of Dominic Da Vinci (Nicholas Campbell), an unorthodox coroner who solves murders with the help of homicide detectives and pathologists in Vancouver’s notorious Downtown Eastside. DiFiore says the fifth season will focus less on the cases themselves and more on their personal impact on the Da Vinci character along with pathologist Sunny Ramen (Suleka Mathew) and homicide officers Sheila Kurtz (Sarah-Jane Redmond), Leo Shannon (Donnelly Rhodes) and Angela Kosmo (Venus Terzo).

(Performers Rhodes and Terzo join the writers as 2002 Gemini nominees.)

The new season will also see the series adopt a more cinematic tone, both in terms of directorial style and a more free-form narrative structure, in anticipation of the Da Vinci’s theatrical feature Haddock has in the works.

DiFiore has been on board the series since day one. He met Haddock when he worked on scripts for the Mom P.I. series Haddock was producing in the early ’90s. Haddock began discussing his plans for Da Vinci’s Inquest with DiFiore as early as 1993, and a few years later the writer got the call.

DiFiore believes that behind TV’s most challenging dramas is a producer who happens to also be a series writer, such as Haddock. Although Da Vinci’s format might be in a well-established Hollywood vein, DiFiore says the writing team is not consciously trying to emulate the U.S. style.

‘You can’t ignore it – you don’t exist in a vacuum, but we don’t really consider it,’ he says. ‘We’ve always just considered that to get a good show done, you really need to maintain that writer-driven idea, and it just so happens in the States they do that and in Britain you see more of it. It’s only in Canada that we’re just coming into that.’

The Da Vinci’s writers are currently tackling the series’ sixty-third episode. Season five debuts on CBC on Oct. 27.