Flashpoint is a Canadian police procedural television series created by Mark Ellis and Stephanie Morgenstern and stars Hugh Dillon, Amy Jo Johnson, David Paetkau, Sergio Di Zio, and Enrico Colantoni. The series premiered on CTV in Canada on July 11, 2008. In the United States, the first three seasons and the first part of the fourth were aired on CBS from July 11, 2008, until August 19, 2011. The show then aired on Ion Television starting on October 18, 2011, with the eighth episode of the fourth season. The series was distributed worldwide by Alchemy Television and Tele München Group.

On January 25, 2011, it was announced that Ion Television had acquired all rights to the show held by CBS, including the option to continue production. On May 1, 2012, the producers announced that the fifth season would be the last of the series. The series finale aired on December 13, 2012.

Flashpoint follows Team One of the Metropolitan Police's Strategic Response Unit, a fictional police tactical unit in an unnamed North American metropolis (based on the Toronto Police Service's Emergency Task Force; the metropolis itself is strongly implied to be Toronto, Ontario).

The majority of the cast of Flashpoint are Canadian, including Enrico Colantoni, David Paetkau, Hugh Dillon, Sergio Di Zio, Michael Cram, Mark Taylor, and Ruth Marshall. Amy Jo Johnson is the only American. In an interview, the show's creators stated that they preferred to cast Canadians in Flashpoint, in part because of the sizeable Canadian talent pool but also because American audiences are less likely to have preconceptions about the characters.

Johnson said she had no problems with the physical demands of the show despite being pregnant during initial production of the series.

Flashpoint was conceived in 2005 as part of a CTV project that encouraged actors to submit scripts to the network. The original Flashpoint script (known earlier as Sniper and Critical Incident) was for a two-hour television film. A pilot episode was produced for CTV in July 2007 under the Critical Incident title featuring most of the cast of what would become the series, but without the characters Jules Callaghan and Lewis Young; the characters in the pilot were Kate Travers and Robert "Shakes" Boneyman. CTV's interest in the project led to Flashpoint's being reworked as a regular CTV series, which was approved in mid-December 2007. The show was unaffected by the 2007–08 Writers Guild of America (WGA) strike because Writers Guild of Canada (WGC) rules allow any members of the WGC living in Canada, including writers with dual WGA/WGC membership, to write for Canadian productions. Writers living in the United States with dual WGA/WGC membership were required to get a waiver from the WGA to work on Canadian productions during the strike.^{[dead link]}

Although originally developed for a Canadian audience, it was announced on January 29, 2008, that American network CBS had purchased the rights to air the series in the United States, making it the second Canadian TV series aired in primetime on an American broadcast network after Due South, also a CTV show aired by CBS. In addition, Flashpoint is the first Canadian series aired by a major American broadcast network set entirely in Canada (as Due South was primarily set in Chicago but filmed in Toronto). On March 5, 2008, CBS announced that Flashpoint would premiere in July. CTV announced on May 8, 2008, that it would simulcast the show in Canada beginning on July 11.

Flashpoint began filming 13 episodes on April 17, 2008. It was written and created by Mark Ellis and Stephanie Morgenstern and executive produced by multiple Gemini Award-winner Anne Marie La Traverse for Pink Sky Entertainment and Bill Mustos for Avamar Entertainment, in association with the CTV Television Network and CBS Television Studios (formerly CBS Paramount Network Television). The pilot episode, titled "Scorpio" was based on an actual event that occurred in Toronto in 2004, in which a gun-wielding hostage-taker was shot and killed by an Emergency Task Force sniper. Ellis and Morgenstern wrote their teleplay for the episode after interviewing members of the ETF. The majority of the episode reused substantial portions of the unaired Critical Incident pilot together with new footage featuring Amy Jo Johnson and Mark Taylor (who were not in the pilot). Director David Frazee carefully shot the SRU as one unit to demonstrate their unity. Producer Anne Marie La Traverse said the show would take people to their "own personal flash point." David Paetkau, one of the show's regular cast members, said Flashpoint "tries to capture the human element involved in policing, and discusses how some officers end up with emotional baggage and suffer with mental illnesses like post traumatic stress disorder." Input and advice from various ETF personnel were used in making the series.