Flashpoint

Though the characters on this show, premiering Friday on CBS, are relatable and watchable, the slow pace might prove to be too much of a cultural divide for an American audience used to the quick cuts and immediate resolve seen on American cop shows.

It has an appealing modesty that survives its bouts of aesthetic overexcitement--the occasionally lurching camera, hammering soundtrack, the sentimental pop song laid over the last couple of minutes as the principals silently end a long, hard day.

Flashpoint lingers when it ought to speed up. It is a show about crisis that refuses to make you anxious.

It goes through the motions quite competently and respectably. But it is nonetheless merely re-creating crime-series moves we've all seen many times before, with only the faintest afterimage of originality.

Flashpoint works through the distress and damage it lays out here, it gets points for beginning with the difficulty, not with the triumph. Now, if it can just figure a way beyond the scary perp clichés.

To be sure, Flashpoint is a perfectly competent police procedural right down to its convincing weaponry and tactics. However, based on the pilot, it isn't particularly fresh or inventive.

If it had something truly new or provocative to say about such matters, the essential redundancy of Flashpoint could be overlooked--but it doesn't, and so it can't. These good guys are too good for their own good. And ours.