The odds had been right for some time that Bill Mustos would one day achieve breakout success with a primetime drama.

It just wasn’t clear until a year ago that he’d do so as an indie producer, and not a network development exec.

Over 10 years with CTV, most recently as SVP of dramatic programming, Mustos, 48, shepherded a string of award-winning TV movies and dramatic series, including The Eleventh Hour, Degrassi: The Next Generation and Robson Arms, to primetime.

Many of the shows Mustos helped mould were produced by Anne Marie La Traverse – first when she worked as an executive producer at the former Alliance Atlantis, and then with her production company Pink Sky Entertainment, launched in 2003.

‘Because Anne Marie and I worked together, and she was one of my favorite producers, we had many occasions to talk over that decade, over what works and what doesn’t work,’ Mustos recalls of his CTV years.

Before CTV, Mustos put his legal training to work as counsel at The Movie Network, where he hammered out licensing agreements and studio output deals, then segued to the former Ontario Film Development Corporation as acting CEO, and next became founding executive director of the Cable Production Fund, the forerunner to one of the first programs in what is now the Canadian Television Fund.

The irony was what Mustos learned over nearly two decades in the Canadian TV industry as a senior executive he wanted to put to use on the other side of the desk, as an indie producer.

So, in summer 2007, having returned from a sabbatical year with his family in southern France, Mustos told CTV he was leaving to become a TV producer.

‘On my return, I realized that life is short and I had this passion to get closer to the clay – that’s how I expressed it to Susanne [Boyce, CTV programming boss],’ he explains.

So Mustos launched Avamar Entertainment with an audacity he’d learnt from CTV head Ivan Fecan.

‘He encouraged risk, and he said, ‘Don’t just swing for singles and doubles, but go out and try to swing for the fence with a home run,” recalls Mustos. ‘Sometimes those risks paid off, other times they didn’t. But so long as you swing for the fences, you’re feeling really connected to the material and invested in the material and not letting your brain take over.’

So that’s when Mustos paired up his Avamar Entertainment with La Traverse’s Pink Sky to coproduce Flashpoint. He insists both partners aim at TV drama that dually engages on emotional and intellectual levels.

‘It’s our passion,’ Mustos offers. ‘And I think that one of the truths that we both feel is, people watch TV, yes, to be entertained – to find an hour of escape after a busy day. But they also watch TV to feel something, to go on a journey and to emerge at the end of that hour of TV feeling something different than what they felt going into the experience.’