Last weekend I had time to go through some new shows that have been accumulating in my DVR’s inbox. I’ve watched 3 episodes of Flashpoint and I liked each one of them. I almost cried at the end of one of them, too. I know, that means I’m a wuss. But it also means it’s good television.

The show follows the Strategic Response Unit, a SWAT-like group of cops that does just about everything: negotiation, profiling, bomb-defusion, and flash-bang raids — whatever the moment requires. The cinematography is top-notch, especially on a HD television. The colors are vivid and bright when they need to be, dark when they should be — whatever helps reinforce the scene. I don’t usually pay much attention to cinematography on television, but I guess that’s because most shows don’t really go out of their way to do a superb job. I enjoyed the picture much so that at times I actually stopped, paused the show, and just looked at the image on the screen, something I don’t often do in a normal television drama. The show is beautiful.

The acting is top-notch.  For all us old-school Felicity fans, Amy Jo Johnson is back (and badder than ever, since now she has guns and grenades!). Enrico Colantoni (probably most famous for playing Elliot on the 1990’s sitcom Just Shoot Me) is a better actor than I ever thought he was. I thought he was just a comedy actor — he was great as an alien in the movie Galaxy Quest – but he does drama well too. And the rest of the pack is a bunch of actors you have probably never heard of, but they all hold their own on screen. The writing is clever but not too clever, funny when you might not expect it and serious when it needs to be. While the show’s drama and tension are solid, and an explosion here and there always helps, the main reason I like the show is because the characters are so accessible. They seem like real people, not “characters,” especially in the episode “Haunting the Barn” (the one that almost made me cry).

You may have missed a few episodes by now, but it’s not too late to start watching. So far there has been only one running thread through the 3 episodes I watched: two of the SRU members started dating and then, realizing that it was affecting their work on the team, called it off. Aside from that, every episode has been self-contained, so it should be easy to jump in and enjoy.

CBS is showing the latest episode of Flashpoint on its website if you want to check it out. Unfortunately they don’t have full prior episodes on Hulu yet.