CBS' 'Flashpoint' fizzles on return to TV

"Flashpoint," CBS' summer SWAT-team replacement series, returns to play with the prime-time big boys at midseason at 8 p.m. Friday, Jan. 9, on WBBM Channel 2. Friday being one of the weaker nights of television, that means "Flashpoint" won't face much more competition than it did last summer, when it was enough of a hit to merit a second go-round, but in fact any competition at all puts this simplistic cop show in jeopardy.

Yes, even "Supernanny" might be enough to have these police officers quaking in their boots.

It's a nice, engaging series, a co-production of CBS and Canada's Pink Sky Entertainment, but at that it's something less than the morally complex and highly dramatic police programs U.S. viewers have grown accustomed to, from "Hill Street Blues" more than 25 years ago to "The Shield" this fall.

"Flashpoint" sets itself some very humble ambitions and sets up some very obvious conflicts to arrive at a quick and easy weekly conclusion. Not to disparage our neighbors to the north, but it's sort of like playing no-contact ice hockey with soccer-size goals. Even when it scores, it's not much worth celebrating.

Friday's season premiere is a perfect illustration. The Strategic Response Unit (read "Special Weapons and Tactics" team, if not Toronto's actual Emergency Task Force) gets an assignment to protect some nabob and his wife as he makes a speech at some high-toned hotel. When a bomb goes off in the kitchen, Hugh Dillon's no-nonsense Ed Lane ushers the guy straight off to safety with dispatch, but Amy Jo Johnson's Jules Callaghan goes to check out the explosion, thus allowing the wife to be kidnapped.

Even so, no one reams her out or criticizes her at all. "Oops," they almost seem to say, "we just lost one of the two persons we were supposed to protect. Oh well." It takes them forever to find her, too, even though she's just been hidden away in a nearby service elevator. Of course, by the time they track her down, she's been bound, gagged and fitted with an exploding necklace that could be set off by remote control. "Oh man," they all but mutter, "what bad guy would do anything so heinous?"

They use dialogue to establish that, by jamming the cell-phone frequencies in the hotel, they can keep the bad guys from setting off the necklace except by using a device like a garage-door opener. It would have to be done within view of the subject, so from there it's a simple matter of trotting her out when her husband makes the speech, then catching the bad guy before he can blow the necklace. It helps that he holds his little garage-door opener up and begins to make a speech himself, creating an easy target for the SRU sharpshooter to blast the device right out of his hand.

Crisis averted, everyone goes home, and Jules even gets to kiss her SRU colleague sweetheart. No harm, no foul.

I don't usually make it a policy to spoil the drama in a drama, but the drama here is so obvious it's not worth preserving. There's a little bit of razzle-dazzle at the very beginning, as Enrico Colantoni's Sgt. Gregory Parker is seen dealing with the middle of the crisis, then it jumps back in time three hours to how it all began. Yet otherwise this is remedial Hollywood screenwriting.

The acting is a little better. Colantoni, familiar from his days playing the private-eye father to "Veronica Mars," is always welcome, and Dillon's Lane is one of the few complex characters in this show. Last summer, they took some pains to establish his thorny, if loving relationship with his wife, and there are hints of that in the season premiere, when the nabob offers to reward him with a hotel suite of his own for the night and an invitation to the wife to join him, but of course that goes out the window with the kidnapping.

"Flashpoint" would seem to be a naturally engaging series about a team of trained professionals, and sometimes it's almost proficient on that level. Yet it has no time for moral complications of any sort - the bad guys even seem to get away with part of their terror plot in the season premiere, at least they get part of what they want in the nabob making a painful confession about his past misdeeds in South America - and that limits its impact. Not even the terrorists pay a price for their misdeeds in this series. It might be no harm, no foul, but that also means no tension or drama.