First in a series celebrating the silver linings in a dark year for entertainment.

You see the evidence on the airways, littered with police procedurals based on American franchises, or Canadian remakes of reality shows such as The Amazing Race or Big Brother.

Critics and regulators have long chastised networks for not taking bolder steps in celebrating our own stories or burnishing our own mythology.

Where is our Downton Abbey or Game of Thrones?

Even tiny Denmark, with less than half the population of Ontario, can make shows as sublime as The Killing or political thrillers such as Borgen, a better version of The West Wing.

This year, Norway received the International Emmy Award for Best Drama Series for political thriller Mammon 2. So why couldn’t we?

It seems Canadian broadcasters have been paying attention: 2017 has been a watershed year for networks who have stepped up to the plate in an unprecedented way, with the kind of dark, morally ambiguous serialized drama that viewers have been getting from cable and online broadcasters such as HBO and Netflix, but which have been conspicuously lacking in the Canadian landscape.

It is the year that Canadian TV got interesting.

This includes: CBC’s Pure, a drug smuggling thriller about a Mennonite gang in southern Ontario; City’s Bad Blood about the Montreal Mafia; Global’s Mary Kills People, about a doctor who helps people commit suicide, and CTV’s Cardinal, a mystery series based on the novels of Giles Blunt.

And they are all unabashedly Canadian.

Cardinal opens with the putt-putt of a snowmobile traversing a bleak, yet stunning Northern Ontario wilderness. A body of a young girl is found encased in ice.

Every shot of this outstanding murder mystery, which returns for Season 2 Jan. 4, aggrandizes the deep, remorseless freeze of the True North. Then there is the art for the series, with stars Billy Campbell and Karine Vanasse looking as if they are fronting a Canada Goose advertising campaign.

You have to admire the chutzpah of a marketing team that is unafraid to put two people entombed in heavy parkas on their poster and dare you to think that North Bay isn’t sexy.

“I think this year has been a real tipping point. It proved that Canada sells. That people can relate to North Bay or Sudbury or anywhere in the world, and that we can go shoulder to shoulder with anyone with our stories,” says Mike Cosentino, president of content and programming for Bell Media, owner of CTV and the nation’s largest private broadcaster. “People say (The Handmaid’s Tale’s) Elisabeth Moss. I say take a look at Karine Vanasse.”

Cosentino has reason to be proud: Cardinal was the No. 1 drama when it debuted at the beginning of this year and a second limited series he developed, The Disappearance starring Peter Coyote, was the top-rated drama this fall.

The two shows along, with CBC’s Pure and Bellevue (starring True Blood’s Anna Paquin) show the inkling of a Canadian TV crime noir industry, joining the ranks of popular American, British and Scandinavian shows such as True Detective, Broadchurch and The Killing.

Perhaps more important than the plaudits is that these Canadian-produced shows are exported globally, earning back revenue and creating a cultural export industry. Cardinal, for example, has been sold to more than 100 markets. And the shows themselves become ambassadors for the networks, creating brand equity for their other programs.

It also means a newly found and more muscular attitude and confidence by Canadian broadcasters as they produce not just domestically, but for the world stage.

“What people are noticing internationally is that Canadians make damn good shows and they are taking notice,” says Lisa Godfrey, vice-president of original content for Corus, which owns Global.

Godfrey is the brave soul responsible for green-lighting the sombre but unsettlingly trippy Mary Kills People, a tragicomedy about a doctor who helps people commit suicide. Not something you’d likely see on American prime time.

“This was very experimental for Global. This was completely different and we weren’t sure it was going to be a success, but we took a chance,” says Godfrey.

Producing serialized drama is a tough slog for a traditional Canadian broadcaster.

The Canadian market is a 10th of the size of the American one. But the cost of producing a quality product is the same, with serialized episodes costing in the $2 million to $3 million range, which includes getting high profile stars. And then there is the constant creative drain, where American broadcasters can afford to pay much more for top quality Canadian talent.

With serialized TV, if audiences don’t tune into the first show viewership drops rapidly since it’s hard to catch up. That’s unlike a typical self-contained procedural or sitcom that can be shown out of sequence and be monetized while it is being viewed many times over.

But the way viewers consume TV means that broadcasters have had to catch up. The game changer for Bell was their Netflix challenger CraveTV, which allows online binge watching. Suddenly, there was a business case for serialized television.

Despite the pitfalls, the rewards of creating critical prestige drama are substantial, helping to give a halo to a brand and bring attention to its other offerings. Besides, executives get tired of hearing they’re showing dreck.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

“Listen, no one is a bigger critic of our own shows than ourselves,” says Cosentino, whose CTV has profited from a strategy of importing high-priced American staples such as The Big Bang Theory, which happens to be the No. 1 show in Canada.

But all you need is one hit. Hulu, once known as the place where you could see reruns of other people’s shows, produced the Toronto-shot Handmaid’s Tale, which won the Best Drama Emmy this year, catapulting the online broadcaster from rerun king into serious dramatic player.

“We are always looking for something that will distinguish our brand and networks need to feed this hunger for compelling drama,” says Nataline Rodrigues, director of original programming for Rogers, which owns City.

Rodrigues commissioned Bad Blood, based on a book co-authored by Toronto Star reporter Peter Edwards about Vito Rizzuto, Montreal’s notorious mob boss. But when producer Mark Montefiore came to her to pitch a show, it was a comedy, not a drama.

“He was talking about his comedy and I asked him what else he had. And he mentioned this book. That lit something up in me,” she says. “It was an original story. It was a Canadian story and it looked at all the moral grey zones that make for compelling drama.”

Bad Blood aired in September with a heavyweight cast right out of a Martin Scorsese film, including Paul Sorvino (Goodfellas), Anthony LaPaglia (Without A Trace) and Kim Coates (Sons of Anarchy).

What is unusual is that the series was greenlit by City, which has the smallest budget of the four major national broadcasters. It’s known for a more playful, irreverent brand, not as the home of serious drama.

“I think this helps us to break out from the clutter of shows, as long as we can continue to tell rich stories,” says Rodrigues. “But while we’re smaller and have to make our resources count, I think it also means we have to be bolder and perhaps be more daring to stand out.”

Of all the Canadian broadcasters, it is the CBC, the nation’s publicly funded network, that seems to have taken the most consistent and bold risks in trying to bring Canadian stories of quality to the screen. And this year has seen an explosion.

This didn’t happen immediately. It started with 2014’s Strange Empire, a bleak western that represented a sharp turn from the network that gave you glad-handing drama like Arctic Air and Republic of Doyle. Perhaps too sharp; viewers weren’t sure what to make of it and it didn’t make it to a second season.

But the long-term strategy has borne fruit, paying off with critical dividends. This year, it debuted Pure, a limited series based on the true story of a drug-trafficking Mennonite mob. There was also Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace, starring Sarah Gadon and written by Sarah Polley: a trio of blue chip names that wouldn’t be out of place at the Toronto International Film Festival, where it debuted.

Even the CBC’s reboot of Anne of Green Gables, simply called Anne, is a real shift: more psychodrama than child’s play. As it should be, since it is written by Canadian Moira Walley-Beckett, who won two Emmy Awards for getting into the mind of infamous drug dealer Walter White in Breaking Bad.

“It was a big, but conscious shift for us to go a little more serialized, to be a bit more character driven in our work,” says Helen Asimakis, senior director of drama for the CBC.

Success also begats success. Asimakis says the CBC wasn’t always the first place that creators would consider when pitching edgy drama. That is beginning to change. But cultivating this kind of auteur TV also means a much more customized approach to the normally cookie cutter world of broadcast where one show typically has many voices.

In the case of Anne and Pure, both series were written by showrunners Walley-Beckett and Michael Amo to create a singular vision.

“There are sometimes a lot of sleepless nights wondering if we made the right decisions. There is no secret formula,” says Asimakis. “What we do know is that our emphasis has always been about working and fostering great Canadian talent, and there is a deep pool out there that exists. The proof is on the screen and the quality of work. And I think viewers are responding.

“And that’s not just to us, but I think there is an awakening in the industry in general and you’re seeing that on your TV set.”