This season of the prizewinning Canadian police drama “19-2” opens with the most agonizingly realistic sequence imaginable of a mass shooting and the close-action chase after an active shooter. It all takes place in a high school in Montreal, where this series about beat cops in the city’s gritty 19th district is set. The camera is alongside a handful of policemen as they enter the school in the chaos created by repeated blasts of gunfire and the shrieks of terrified students crouched under desks or running down hallways dotted...  This season of the prizewinning Canadian police drama “19-2” opens with the most agonizingly realistic sequence imaginable of a mass shooting and the close-action chase after an active shooter. It all takes place in a high school in Montreal, where this series about beat cops in the city’s gritty 19th district is set. The camera is alongside a handful of policemen as they enter the school in the chaos created by repeated blasts of gunfire and the shrieks of terrified students crouched under desks or running down hallways dotted with fallen bodies.  The point is not to show blood, of which there is little, but to show the guts it takes to do a cop’s job. As the police advance toward the sounds of gunfire—their drawn weapons steady but their breathing only barely under control and their terror palpable—we feel sick with fear, too. One policeman can’t take it, in fact, and we watch him crumple inside as he picks up a wounded woman so he can carry her out of the building and never go back. We can’t escape. We must go back inside when the camera does until, at last, the action is over.  The 2 in “19-2” refers to the squad-car number of the central characters, Nick Barron (Adrian Holmes, mysterious like Idris Elba’s character in “Luther”) and Ben Chartier (Jared Keeso, working a little cornfed Brando vibe). Nick doesn’t know it, but he is under investigation as a possible mole who has been leaking information to the underworld. Worse, as it turns out, Nick doesn’t know that Ben has been assigned to spy on him.  Their relationship on and off the job as each wrestles with inner demons sometimes is the standard stuff of police dramas. So is the interplay between other sets of patrol-car partners in District 19, whether they are tough while on duty but driven to have promiscuous sex at night or are trying to stop drinking before they get fired.  But the characters also are pleasingly exotic. Something about the setting, and the differences—even subtle ones—in the way Canadians approach issues such as race, sex, gender and justice, also makes “19-2” exciting in a wholly new way. And although the series on Acorn was filmed in English, some viewers might also enjoy tracking down an earlier version of “19-2” that was made in French.
TV columnist Nancy deWolf Smith reviews “19-2” a Canadian police drama set in Montreal, and available May 16 on Acorn.