McGill News Alumni Magazine

Flashpoint Co-Creator Takes Aim At Final Season

 by Sheldon Gordon

The CTV series Flashpoint, co-created by Stephanie Morgenstern and starring Enrico Colantini and Hugh Dillon, has earned four Gemini Awards

When screenwriter Stephanie Morgenstern, BA’88, crafted the TV pilot for the Toronto-based police drama Flashpoint, she toured the headquarters of the city’s real emergency task force and talked extensively with its officers to get a good grasp of the procedures, teamwork and emotions involved in resolving hostage-takings, bomb threats and other high-risk events.

Her homework paid off, as the television series, which airs on CTV, averages an impressive 1.5 million Canadian viewers each episode.  The show, which begins its fifth and final season on September 27, was picked up in 2008 by CBS, becoming the first Canadian TV drama series clearly set in Canada to air in prime time on American network television. Notwithstanding its appeal in the U.S. (where it now airs on Ion Television), Morgenstern, who co-created the show with her writing partner (and husband) Mark Ellis, is proud that the series is different from typical U.S. cop dramas.

Most U.S. police shows are about, “We’re going to kick bad-guy butt big-time,” she says. “Flashpoint is about, how can we make violence unnecessary? The SWAT team’s greatest victories are in not using their weapons. There are serious emotional repercussions for officers who have to take a life.”

Morgenstern got the idea for the show from a shocking event in 2004, when a gunman was shot dead by a SWAT team sniper after holding a random woman hostage for 30 minutes outside Toronto’s Union Station. (Morgenstern played the role of the hostage in the pilot episode based on the incident.)

Flashpoint is just one of many successful projects that Morgenstern has worked on as a writer, director and actor over the course of her diverse career.  She has performed extensively on stage, film, and television, in both English and French. Born in Geneva, and raised in Montreal, she began acting in 1979, when at age 12, she volunteered for a theatre troupe celebrating the International Year of the Child.

Stephanie Morgenstern (Photo: Tim Leyes)

She majored in English at McGill, taking film and communications electives. She was influenced by professors such as Paisley Livingston and Darko Suvin. “They taught me to look at culture more deeply, and to ask why certain television shows and commercials are produced.” Exploring the dark underbelly of popular culture, she wrote an essay on the link between Listerine advertisements and the Cold War.

Following graduate studies in Toronto, Morgenstern did a season at the Stratford Festival, playing Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream on the main stage.  In 1997, she co-starred in The Sweet Hereafter, director Atom Egoyan’s Oscar-nominated film.

Morgenstern has received two Genie nominations.  The first was for co-directing (with her brother Mark Morgenstern) the short film Curtains/Rideau (1995), which she also starred in and wrote.  The second was for directing the short film Remembrance, a World War Two drama (2001), which she co-wrote and acted in with her husband, Ellis. The film follows an evening in the life of a man with a perfect memory who is recruited by Canada’s spy service.

Perhaps Morgenstern’s biggest audience was one that never actually saw her: she was the original English-language voice of Sailor Venus in the dubbed version of the Japanese anime hit Sailor Moon.  “The dubbing was like doing karaoke,” following words displayed on a video screen, “but much tougher,” she recalls.

Morgenstern’s acting will take a back seat to her writing for now.  She has her hands full as she and Ellis develop a new TV adventure drama set in Canada with international elements. “I’d like to act again if it’s the right part,” she says, “but the pursuit of acting – the non-stop auditions – I’d be happy to leave that behind.”

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