The LA Complex and Todd and the Book of Pure Evil are two of the best shows to come out of Canada in recent years

Teen-centric network the CW boasts a programming roster bursting with vampires, werewolves, witches, demons, evil twins, superheroes and assassins. A new element has just been added to that mix. Something a whole lot weirder. Canadians.

Since time immemorial, the door to American network TV has remained locked and bolted to any non-domestic content. But, over the last few years, that door began to crack open.

Over the lazy, humid, repeat-stuffed summer months, the networks started to pepper their schedules with Canadian dramas. Boring cop shows like Rookie Blue and Flashpoint, and personality-free medical series like Combat Hospital functioned as placebo programming: second-rate approximations of entertainment tiding viewers over until their favorite shows returned. Last week, the CW did something unprecedented. The network unveiled a Canadian series before the official end of the broadcast season.

Not only was the show's launch historic, its reception was record-breaking. The premiere of The LA Complex was officially the lowest-rated network drama of all time. Ever. So congratulations on that, Canada, and also for flying in the face of national tradition and producing a series that promises little but then never stops surprising.

It's not hard to see why the CW snapped up The LA Complex. A cross between Fame and Melrose Place from the producers of Canada's long-running Degrassi, it follows a group of success-starved Canucks who subsist in the same low-rent apartment building as they negotiate the treacherous, pitiless terrain of being unknown in LA.

They're marooned in a world where everyone's hot, everyone's talented, everyone goes up for the same part and everyone waits nervously for the call from their agent telling them their days of waitressing are over and the big break has finally arrived. In other words, it's the inspiring story of every actor who ever got cast on a CW show. At least, it would be if it wasn't Canadian.

If an American production company had made The LA Complex according to the directives of the network, it would have been filled with heartbreak and triumph, tears of sorrow and joy, and hard-earned life lessons. Instead, it reeks of failure.

Consider these moments from the first episode. Raquel, the over-the-hill (ie pushing 30) actress best known from a swiftly-cancelled cult show, fakes her way into an audition for a best-friend role – only to find that the part is now for a black best friend.

Exploding with embarrassment and frustration, she harangues the roomful of young black actresses: "Who has a black best friend? Do any of you have a white best friend? This is such a TV thing!" Ejected from the audition, Raquel skulks off to crash an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in the hopes of making important industry contacts. For extra added verisimilitude, Raquel is played by Jewel Staite, best known for the swiftly-cancelled cult show Firefly.

Abby (Degrassi grad Cassie 'Manny Santos' Steele), who is set up as the series' plucky, multi-talented golden girl, takes ecstasy and sleeps with a pretty-boy Australian actor who just got the lead in a big medical drama. The next morning Abby slumps into her audition late and looking like death. Nevertheless, she regroups and wows the producers with a soulful take on a Bachman-Turner Overdrive classic (Canadian!). Then she projectile-vomits into the piano and ends her morning sitting at a bus shelter smelling so rank even bums shuffle away from her.

Finally, there's Nick, the nebbishy would-be stand-up. He's got no material, no delivery and no confidence. Luckily, he has the one attribute every comic needs: a healthy dose of self-loathing. Nick gets a bottom-of-the-bill spot at LA's famed Improv club. Before he goes on, he encounters LA comedy luminaries Mary Lynn Rajskub (aka Chloe from 24) and Paul F Tompkins. They're established comics. He's a nervous rookie. We're seeing a lot of mentor/rookie relationships on TV these days. They tend towards the nurturing and supportive.

Rajskub and Tompkins, playing themselves, shit all over fictional Nick. They kill his confidence before he goes on. They mock his pitiful act while he's attempting to perform and, after he leaves the stage with silence ringing in his ears, they do not console him or tell him he nailed it. They rub his deficiencies in his face and they look delighted to be doing it. This. Happens. (Somebody connected to The LA Complex knows their comedy. In a subsequent episode, Nick is seduced by a brittle female comic who invites him to her home under the pretext of listening to Andrew Dice Clay's The Day the Laughter Died, legitimately one of the most uncomfortable comedy records of all time.)

My peeve with TV shows purporting to hold up a mirror to the entertainment industry is that they're invariably smaller than life.

NBC's heinous Smash only makes sense if it's viewed as a musical about a TV show about a musical. And even then it doesn't make that much sense. The LA Complex is exactly life-size. Life, for Canadian showbiz hopefuls, is messy and filled with failure. The CW audience may not appreciate that version of life, but I do. And so did the other six people watching.

I don't know if the cable network Fearnet is even able to muster an audience of six people. But Fearnet is the current home of my other favorite imported Canadian series. It's called Todd and the Book of Pure Evil. But don't stop reading. Remember season one Buffy? Before the angst and the depth and the relationships had really asserted themselves? When it was basically demon possession of the week? That's Todd and the Book of Pure Evil.

Todd's a lethargic Canadian high-school stoner in a heavy metal T-shirt. His school is infested by a flying demonic tome that grants wishes to losers. Todd and his band of misfits try and fail to stop the book as it, variously, transforms a birthday cake into a cannibalistic killing machine that terrorizes the school, turns the fat it sucked out of a student into a rampaging mass of good that terrorizes the school and makes a teen mom give birth to a giant baby that terrorizes the school.

Todd and the Book of Pure Evil is engaging, inventive and makes a single goofy idea work a lot better and a lot longer than it should. I'm not about to declare a Canadian TV renaissance – I couldn't make it through an episode of the culty Lost Girl, which is kind of Buffy the Succubus – but I'm glad these two shows made it out of the frozen north and on to American screens.