The long road to success for Flashpoint was about finding the right story idea and script for the Canadian ensemble cop drama, and then getting CTV and CBS to bite.

The germ of the series was born on a sweltering August day in 2004, when a 45-year-old man held a sawed-off .22-caliber rifle to a young woman’s head outside Union Station in Toronto. And like countless other Canadians, TV actor/writers Stephanie Morgenstern and Mark Ellis watched the drama unfold on television as Toronto’s Emergency Task Force used lethal force to end the crisis.

‘It was a horrible incident that really struck a chord with us,’ recalls Ellis, adding that they also saw the building blocks for a TV movie via the crack police negotiators and snipers at work.

So they pitched CTV, and specifically Bill Mustos, then the network’s SVP of dramatic programming.

Mustos recalls that the combination of a high-profile news story and a TV movie that portrayed a police sniper grappling with the emotional demands of his job seized his attention.

So he put the project into CTV’s development pipeline.

The first script was completed in late spring 2005 and focused on a sniper character, Ed Lane. But that was only the beginning of a series of Flashpoint incarnations by the original writers. Numerous other development pieces needed to click into place before Morgenstern and Ellis could realize their original vision.

This included CTV attaching a producer to the project – a familiar face, Anne Marie La Traverse of Toronto’s Pink Sky Entertainment.

‘I saw a kind of maturity in [Morgenstern’s and Ellis’] writing, even though they were fresh writers and seasoned actors,’ La Traverse remembers.

By the fall of 2006, La Traverse, Morgenstern and Ellis were a team with a plan to parlay a two-hour TV movie into a backdoor pilot.

La Traverse, as advocate, effectively lent the cop drama the comfort level that CTV required. A second script was written, along with a series bible.

Veteran cinematographer David Frazee (Intelligence) was hired to direct a potential pilot, which CTV greenlit in June 2007 with the working title The Sniper.

Casting the character-driven police drama was crucial. Punk-rocker-turned-actor Hugh Dillon, who had impressed with his star turn in Durham County, was tapped to play sniper Ed Lane, and Enrico Colantoni (Veronica Mars) was hired as Sgt. Gregory Parker, head of the emergency response team.

Then, in August 2007 – after the pilot wrapped production – La Traverse reconnected with Mustos, who had just returned from a year-long sabbatical in France and had left CTV to pursue indie production – to get ‘closer to the clay,’ as he puts it.

Mustos, after viewing an early cut of the pilot, decided to hitch his wagon at Avamar Entertainment with Pink Sky Entertainment and get behind Flashpoint.

And in a big way. He and La Traverse didn’t just tinker with Flashpoint after it was greenlit as a series by CTV. In September 2007, they began major surgery by turning the earlier idea of a serialized drama into an episodic series.

‘Between reshaping the show so it was structured as an episodic, we spent close to two to three months really beating down. It was always the thing we woke up thinking about, and the thing we thought about at night,’ Mustos recalls.

After much trial and error, they arrived at a superstructure for each episode: start with a flash-forward to the ‘flashpoint’ moment at a critical incident, then return to the beginning, and tell the story of ‘how’ and ‘why’ the incident takes place.

Susanne Boyce, CTV president, creative, content and channels, points to her network deciding to develop pilots for the first time, and to Mustos and La Traverse exhaustively honing and refining the Flashpoint concept for the series’ success.

‘It had never been possible in this country until this year – not only to produce wonderful and beautiful things, but to have the network put a stamp on it. That’s what CBS responded to,’ Boyce says.

By December 2007, Mustos and La Traverse had a series green light for 13 episodes from CTV, as well as a Dec. 11 date to pitch a row of CBS executives, led by entertainment president Nina Tassler, in Los Angeles (see story, p. 18).

‘We probably only established contact at the tail end of November – we did feel from the very beginning that this felt like a CBS show. Every network has its own personality. This was a good fit for CBS. We were keen to establish contact,’ Mustos recalls.

‘We had an amazing 90-minute meeting that was all about the creative aspects of the show,’ he adds.

Never mind the Hollywood writers strike. The eye network seized on the Flashpoint concept.

La Traverse says the CBS execs pressed them on how they got such high production values for so little money, compared to U.S. network pilots. (Although the show’s makers won’t reveal the budget, it has been reported at up to $1.8 million per episode, making it the costliest Canadian series ever.)

The CBS execs also knew Flashpoint had CTV and Canadian Television Fund financing in the can, and that its producers knew the series through and through.

‘We had our series ordered, and had it financed, and we had a very clear creative vision on how to execute the show, which came from producing the pilot in July, as well as hard work and reflection in the fall,’ La Traverse recalls.

After the producers pitched the drama on the CBS lot, they had a coffee in Hollywood with leads Dillon and Colantoni before flying back to Toronto. No sooner had they landed than they found Blackberry messages from CBS, and a phone message from CBS SVP Christina Davis, who was serious about Flashpoint and wanted to take the conversation to the next level.

‘It happened in a very short period of time,’ Mustos says of landing the CBS deal in January 2008, midway through the Writers Guild of America strike. With CBS signed up for a reverse simulcast of a Canadian-made series, and an April 2008 start date for production on the calendar, expectations for Flashpoint went through the roof.

Then Alchemy TV and Tele München came on board as international distributors, and Tassie Cameron (The Eleventh Hour) was hired to lead Flashpoint’s writing room.

Cameron’s big challenge was to avoid the machismo and violence of most police procedurals and portray an elite police force in Toronto that uses empathy and human psychology to possibly pull people caught up in a critical incident back from the brink.

Ahead of a July 11, 2008 premiere date on CBS and CTV for Flashpoint, U.S. TV critics expressed skepticism about a touchy-feely Canadian drama on American TV schedules.

There was also chatter about a Friday night timeslot, meaning that CBS was dumping its Canadian acquisition onto the air, not expecting much. But the executive producers weren’t deterred.

Mustos and La Traverse knew what CBS schedulers were doing to back the series. It worked. At 11 a.m. on Saturday morning, July 12, their Blackberries ‘rang’ with the first overnight ratings and charts from CBS. In those first panicked seconds, they struggled to make sense of the numbers flashing up on the screen. Then a scan of the network summary revealed Flashpoint had won the night for CBS. Success.

‘That was a particularly joyous moment. We really had no sense of what [ratings] we would do,’ Mustos recollects.

By that Monday, CTV reported 1.3 million Canadians had tuned in to the debut episode, on top of the 8.7 million viewers stateside.

After the second episode, CBS moved Flashpoint to Thursday nights at 10 p.m., where the last episode aired in early September.

With a hit series in hand, CBS and CTV are bringing Flashpoint back in the first quarter of 2009 to begin another 18-episode run.