Posted on Thu, Jul. 10, 2008

• Flashpoint, 10-11 p.m. Friday, WFOR-CBS 4

From the rouge -- a mysterious and possibly sinister kicking play they added to U.S. football -- to poutin -- a barbarous dish made from french fries, cheese curd and gravy -- Canadians have always been a puzzle to their American neighbors. And Flashpoint, the new CBS cop drama from north of the border, doesn't really clarify anything.

Originally commissioned for Canadian television and then picked up by CBS, which has apparently run out of ideas for new CSI spinoffs, Flashpoint follows the adventures of a fictional Toronto SWAT team. And it's got all the little weirdnesses you might expect from a country that named its favorite dessert pets de soeurs -- literally, nun's farts.

Do Canadian cops really serenade each other with little bits of Gilbert and Sullivan? And is that some odd igloo dialect they're speaking, or is Canadian police jargon really that much more incomprehensible than ours? (Go ahead, translate this sentence: ``Five, six, spike DDS and flashbangs!'')

If you can ignore stuff like the impossibly clean subways and the fact that the cops call one another ''constable'' with straight faces, Flashpoint is actually rather formulaic. Hugh Dillon plays the gruff sniper who has trouble expressing his feelings to his family; Enrico Colantoni is the fatherly unit commander; and Amy Jo Johnson is the pint-sized policewoman who is constantly having to prove herself to the guys. (Though I don't know why. Didn't they see how tough she was as the pink one in Mighty Morphin Power Rangers?)

Colantoni, whose ironic wit was one of the high points of Veronica Mars, is largely wasted here. At least, I think so; it's possible that lines like ''We may have a TPI here!'' are layered with sardonic nuance undetectable to the American ear. At times the dialogue was so impenetrable that I felt like a character in the show who, when asked what language a swarthy hostage-taker is bellowing at the police, replies: ``Middle Eastern. European. Something.''