What was the biggest break in your TV career?
Since this is for Field & Post I’ll stick to the unscripted side of my career. In that world the biggest break had to be walking into Force Four for a meeting to talk about directing season 2 of “Shopping Bags”. During the meeting more and more people kept walking into the interview and by the end there must have been half a dozen people in front of me. They were asking questions about producing and managing a team and running a show, super intense for a directing interview. It turned out their series producer had quit the day before and without me knowing, they were interviewing me for the series producer position. By the end of the meeting I had the job and ended up producing over 90 episodes of Shopping Bags and many series after that.
What has been your greatest mistake in your career?
I was running the lifestyle division at Omni and we were in production on “Word Travels” for OLN and “Smart Cookies” for W Network, when HGTV asked me if I wanted to Exec Produce a new, environmentally-friendly design show they were creating. We had just finished “She’s Crafty” for them and it went super well so I was excited to say yes! Imagine – I didn’t have to pitch them – they pitched me! We immediately went into development and looked for a Vancouver-based host, but it was Toronto’s Samantha Pynn who was the overwhelming favourite. The hitch was she didn’t want to shoot in Vancouver, so we ended up producing the show in Toronto. At that point I should have said no, we couldn’t do it. I didn’t have the same contacts in Toronto I had in Vancouver, so although I made some great hiring decisions, I also made some really poor ones. And I ended up spending so much time in Toronto during the early episodes that my family and I suffered. But my biggest regret is that Samantha didn’t have the nurturing environment a new host should have had – so for me, saying yes to producing Pure Design in Toronto when I was based in Vancouver has been my biggest mistake.
