Alex Strachan is the national TV critic for Canwest News Service, based out of Vancouver

While I would say that the recent sales of Canadian shows to U.S. television is absolutely an anomaly caused by the writers strike, something interesting has been going on over the past year.

With the proliferation of cable channels in the U.S., a lot of the smaller outfits are desperately casting around for material. The syndication rerun business is not what it used to be, and there are only so many times an independently owned TV station can rerun a seven-year-old episode of Seinfeld.

And, yes, a lot of those station buyers have been looking north to Canada. That’s obvious – but here’s the interesting part. Da Vinci’s Inquest was recently sold as a package to Superstation WGN in Chicago, and it became a huge ratings hit for them. Okay, we’re talking late-night and so-so competition, but still…

This is a show that took forever to get sold to the U.S. market, even though it had already sold in other countries all over the world.

I remember show creator Chris Haddock telling me several years ago that Da Vinci’s Inquest was close to a sale to A&E, but nothing ever came of it. He said its ‘Canadian-ness’ was proving a problem, because it looked ‘sort-of-American’ without being the real deal. If only the characters talked with British accents, he was told, it would be an easier sell to the A&E audience. (A&E was really into Brit TV at the time, but not now – now it’s all about reality TV).

The point is nobody thought Da Vinci’s would work in the U.S. market. And when somebody did take a chance – WGN – it exploded. The very thing that weighed against it – it’s sort-of-but-not-quite American-ness – is exactly what U.S. viewers like about it. It isn’t cookie-cutter U.S. TV with a cover-model, pretty-boy lead actor. The people in Da Vinci’s look like real, normal people, and viewers really responded to that.

Da Vinci’s success led directly to WGN picking up Corner Gas. Again, remember, all this has happened in the past year. Once upon a time, Corner Gas would have been considered too quiet, too low-key and too slow for an American audience. Now that it’s actually there, the numbers are proving otherwise. (The first two episodes attracted 357,000 and 290,000 viewers, numbers not far off those of America’s Funniest Home Videos, the station’s highest-ranked show at the time.)

The major U.S. networks remain a whole different ballgame, of course. They are ruthless with their own shows – shows they’ve already bought and paid for. So just because they’ve purchased an option on a show that hasn’t even been made yet, as they have with Flashpoint and The Listener, it’s no guarantee that either of them will see the light of day on CBS and NBC, respectively.

Once a show is actually on a U.S. network’s schedule – a big if – the network won’t stay with that show the way a CBC or CTV would if it performs below expectations. We’re talking about people who think nothing of spending $20 million-plus to develop a show like Viva Laughlin with a high-profile star like Hugh Jackman, and then gas it after TWO EPISODES when it doesn’t pull down CSI-type numbers.

Canadian program developers would be wise to not get their hopes up too high over the recent U.S. network sales. It is a foot in the door, though – a foot in the door that didn’t exist two years ago. The writers strike is a big reason; it’s not as if the U.S. program executives were taking a close look at TV in Ireland or Australia a year ago, except to consider doing their own rip-off versions of successful shows there. Due South, a terrific Canadian success story, was somewhat of a lucky hit when CBS picked it up in the 1990s.

Da Vinci’s Inquest has changed everything, though. If nothing else, it’s proven that there is an audience – a big audience – for well-made Canadian drama in the U.S. (emphasis on well-made). Whether that audience is big enough to sustain a show on a major network like CBS or NBC remains to be seen. But it’s a nice start.

I can tell you this, though. The days of the ‘Canadian look’ are long gone.

While it’s easy for Toronto, taxpayer-supported Cancon types to rail against ‘U.S. crap’ – they do it all the time – the reality is that runaway U.S. production here in Vancouver has helped shape and train local film crews that are among the best at what they do, anywhere in the world.

American directors – David Nutter (Traveler), for example – tell me they can’t get enough of the Vancouver crews; some of them even hire them away back to L.A. Fox’s 24 is staffed top-to-bottom with Canadian crew talent, even though it shoots in L.A. That happened as a direct result of the producers shooting La Femme Nikita in Toronto several years ago and getting to know the crew there – and, more importantly, knowing they could rely on them.

Cancon types who rail against offshore U.S. production forget that those skilled, trained crews are bringing their ‘A’ game when it comes to working on homegrown shows such as Intelligence or The Guard. Many Vancouver crew members have come off shows like The X-Files and Battlestar Galactica, and they have Emmys to prove it. That means the new Canadian dramas look and sound as good as anything being made in Burbank. That has nothing to do with the writers strike – it’s a natural side effect of offshore production. The more people work, the better they become at what they do.

Still, I’m a little leery of any deal involving a TV show that hasn’t even been made yet. Corner Gas and Da Vinci’s Inquest were proven quantities, and their success in syndication is big-time good news for Canadian production. It will open a lot of doors for Canadian producers and program providers. Whether those doors lead to anything is a bit of a crapshoot. Everything in TV is a gamble, after all, and U.S. network TV is a kind of wild, Wild West where there are no rules. Little, if anything, makes sense in that world.

Haddock once told me that he didn’t think Americans were interested in seeing anybody but themselves on their TV screens. Fortunately – for everyone – his own Da Vinci’s Inquest has disproved that. What’s happening now is really cool to see. Just don’t assume it will lead to bigger and better things down the road. It might – but then it just as easily might not.