Cop series Flashpoint is lapping up praise for the amazing numbers its debut episode scored for both CTV and CBS, and it promises to be the first homegrown drama to make it in U.S. network primetime since Due South. Of course, we have yet to see how many of the eight million-plus summertime American viewers who tuned into the pilot will return, but in the meanwhile, we can all rejoice.

And let’s remember this: before there was CBS, before there were producers Anne Marie La Traverse and Bill Mustos, before there was CTV – there was the germ of an idea, and it came out of the heads of series co-creators Stephanie Morgenstern and Mark Ellis.

You may have heard of this married couple – in fact, you’ve likely seen them before. Both have been actors on the Canadian scene for years. Morgenstern, 42, began her career 30 years ago as the narrator of Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang, while Ellis, 38, has, over the past decade, appeared in series including Dark Oracle and Paradise Falls. They collaborated on the short film Remembrance – she directed, they co-wrote and co-starred, and it grabbed prizes including a 2002 Jutra Award.

Like many Canadians, they were glued to the tube in the summer of 2004 when news cameras focused on a disturbed armed man who grabbed a random female hostage outside Toronto’s Union Station after having taken shots at his wife in the TD Centre. The horrifying incident came to an end when a police sniper took the man down with a fatal head shot.

It wasn’t the hostage-taking incident itself that piqued the actors so much as the situation in which the police task force found itself.

‘We tend not to think about what it’s like for those guys, and, sure enough, it’s not black and white for them,’ Ellis says of the squad that ultimately opted to pull the trigger.

The pair initially saw in this story ripe material for an MOW.

‘By the end of the day, we had already mentioned it to our agents, and they thought right away, ‘Let’s see if CTV is into this,” Morgenstern adds, speaking a day ahead of Flashpoint’s debut.

And they are more than thrilled that the project has evolved into a series. Their thespian roots are apparent in the pilot episode – in which Morgenstern plays the hostage – with the show’s focus on character nuance.

Whereas many Hollywood shows would concentrate on the action, Flashpoint dedicates a fair bit of screen time to the aftermath of the event, particularly its emotional impact on sniper Ed Lane (Hugh Dillon). We don’t know exactly what is going on in his head after he kills a man, but we know something is, and the creators acknowledge that more will be revealed in subsequent episodes.

‘Television offers you an opportunity to build and layer characters very slowly and pull back the layers on them in a way that you can’t in more of a conventional film structure,’ Ellis notes.

From an artistic point of view, it is no doubt gratifying to unfold a narrative master plan over a full season’s worth of episodes, but that luxury must unfortunately intersect with the harsh realities of the TV biz. And nowhere are those realities harsher than in Hollywood, where a network will pay millions to develop, produce and promote a show – only to give it the axe after a couple of episodes.

But based on the launch of Flashpoint, that shouldn’t be a concern. And besides, this series was developed with Canadian viewers in mind. It was producers Mustos – who had initially greenlit the project when still an exec at CTV – and La Traverse who pursued and locked up the deal with CBS. ‘It was gravy – it was a surprise to us,’ Ellis says.

What worked in the project’s favor with the eye network were the WGA strike and the fact that the networks had a dearth of new material. What seemed to be working against it, however, was the 10 p.m. slot on Fridays in the summer. It was odd for CTV to make such a big deal about the series at its upfront presentation only to reveal the most undesirable timeslot of them all. But clearly this had to do with simulcast and when CBS wanted to air it. But – and again, the results are early – this doesn’t appear to have slowed the show down one bit.

For its part, CTV deserves top marks for its promotion of the series with a very forward-looking campaign that has included an aggressive online push. You’d have to have been living under a rock in recent weeks to have not known this show is on. As Morgenstern says, ‘We could not ask for a better launch than this.’

And what has been accomplished is significant. After years of our airwaves being dominated by Hollywood product, it is heartening to see Canadian-made programming grabbing some of that huge market to the south. And with MVP attracting attention on SOAPnet, Sophie upcoming on ABC Family and The Listener on NBC, it would appear a boom time of Canadian drama exports is upon us.

And let’s just not forget that in the case of each of these shows, somebody had to create them.