There’ll be no surprise if cast and crew on Foundation Features and Lark Productions’ Motive drama take time out Sunday to watch the Super Bowl game on CTV.

The network’s rookie cop drama scored the plum post-Super Bowl slot, which virtually guarantees strong debut audience numbers.

“Our good partners at the CTV have done a good launch,” Louise Clark, executive producer at Lark Productions, tells Playback.

CTV’s Super Bowl bet on Motive comes as Clark believes she has a better mousetrap with her first scripted series at Lark Productions to snag viewers for a homegrown drama.

The trick is revealing all about the murder victim and killer to the audience as each episode starts.

Not your normal cop drama.

Motive, created by Daniel Cerone and showrun by James Thorpe, is instead more a murder-mystery detective series.

Here the creators deliberately modeled the Canadian drama in part on the long-running American detective drama Columbo, which starred Peter Falk, and other popular cop dramas like Prime Suspect.

Motive lead character Angie Flynn, played by Kristin Lehman, resembles Falk’s Columbo character by being underestimated by murder suspects, even as she battles them with her wit and wiles.

But it’s the lack of a whodunit element in Motive, where the murder victim and killer is identified early on, that makes the cop drama stand out for ambition.

“The audience knows, but the cop doesn’t,” Clark explains.

The result is Motive becomes a whydunnit, where the suspense comes from how Flynn and fellow Vancouver cop Oscar Vega, played by Louis Ferreira, ultimately catch the killer.

“It allows the characters of the personalities involved in our murder, and our cops, to come out,” Clark adds.

Recall Columbo’s catch-phrase: “Just one more thing…”

Here the motivation of the killer is revealed as Peter Falks’ character, and now Angie Flynn in Motive, uncover clues to a killer’s guilt.

That leaves audiences of Motive always one step ahead of Flynn and Vega, who only at the end of each episode finally nab the bad guy and right-size a chaotic world.

“For the viewer, it’s a straight line. For Angie, it’s not a straight line. It’s a maze, where she goes down one avenue and then another,” showrunner James Thorpe explains.

“Slowly the viewer watches her (Flynn) piece the way through a maze that they know the answer to, but not the journey,” he adds.

Motive has production financing from its international distributor, NBCUniversal, with whom Lark Productions has a first-look deal.

But no U.S. broadcaster is as yet attached.

Clark is confident that will change soon.

“We’re optimistic that we will have some news,” she insists.