John Brunton keeps making the impossible possible

The head of Insight Productions takes a moment from his prolific producing work to reflect on his career, ahead of being honoured at the Canadian Screen Awards.

When John Brunton pitched the idea for the teen drama series Falcon Beach to Barbara Williams at Global Television, she knew he had an eye for the Canadian market that few other producers did.

“Part of John’s magic, throughout his career, is that he’s so passionately Canadian,” Williams, now EVP at CBC, tells Playback. “At the same time, he always had big ambitions to make beautiful television that everybody could relate to.”

Beyond Falcon Beach, which aired from 2005 to 2007, the chair, CEO and executive producer at Insight Productions has produced many iconic Canadian TV series during his 45-year career. They include scripted series such as Ready or Not and Hatching, Matching & Dispatching; formats like Canadian Idol, The Amazing Race Canada and Big Brother Canada; and memorable live TV moments, including the Juno Awards (pictured right) and The Tragically Hip: A National Celebration.

At this year’s Canadian Screen Awards — which the company has also produced in the past — Brunton is going to be honoured for that special ability to represent Canadians on screen with the Academy Board of Directors’ Tribute Award. At the same time, Brunton’s company is having its best financial year yet, he says.

According to Insight, its revenue for 2024 is up 40% compared to the same period in 2023, and by 35% compared to 2022. The company is also tracking ahead for greenlights and renewals compared to last year.

Beyond his long list of credits, Brunton has several new projects in the works, many of which he can’t talk about. But he does say he’s pursuing “more aggressive partnerships with American and international production partners” and that he’s “on the precipice of landing a big fish.”

Insight also has many new projects in development right now. “We’re doing the opposite of specializing,” says Brunton. “A documentary about Gordon Lightfoot’s career, a reality game show, a scripted show or the adrenaline rush of live television — it’s all attractive to me.”

He acknowledges the challenges of the Canadian market, with fewer broadcasters to work with, dwindling budgets and evaporating advertising. But Brunton has worked his whole career to diversify his portfolio and prepare Insight for this. “We’re trying to keep our heads down, come up with innovative ideas for new shows, tell great stories and explore new technology,” he says. “There will always be an audience that wants to consume great storytelling. That’s what I’ve put my hopes on for 45 years, and it’s served me well so far.”

At the heart of what makes Brunton such a prolific producer is his ability to make uniquely Canadian content.

“We are our own country, with our own culture, issues and concerns and [Brunton] always worked hard to make that shine through in whatever project he was making,” says Williams. “Along the way, he’s encountered that Canada can be a challenging place to shoot, but he never saw that as something to stop him from making a big and spectacular production.”

During his time at Insight, Brunton has been awed by talented, uniquely Canadian voices and tapped into what those audiences wanted, especially when it wasn’t represented in the pervasive U.S. content seeping on to Canadian airwaves. That often included figure skating, working on TV specials such as 1996’s Scott Hamilton: Upside Down and hit show Battle of the Blades. He also revered comics, culminating in the recent Prime Video series LOL: Last One Laughing Canada featuring Jay Baruchel, Andrew Phung and Mae Martin. And, of course, musicians played a big role in his career, producing the Juno Awards.

One of Brunton’s greatest gifts is his ability to take reality TV formats from all over the world and share them with Canadian audiences in a way that is different and interesting from the U.S. versions. With Canadian Idol, that meant having the contestants play instruments in homage to Canada’s great history of singer-songwriters; for Amazing Race that often meant travelling within Canada; and for Big Brother that meant completely rethinking casting. “Part of his secret sauce is that nothing is two-dimensional,” says Erin Brock, Big Brother Canada‘s showrunner and an SVP at Insight. “You don’t just cast a nerd or the girl-next-door, you cast people that reflect our country, that are complicated and have stories to tell.”

After struggling in the early pandemic years, Insight has bounced back financially. He attributes the increase to growing the company’s development slate and working innovatively with commercial advertisers and broadcast sales teams, especially on Big Brother Canada (pictured left).

To keep the format, which airs three days a week, profitable and enticing to broadcast partner Corus Entertainment, Insight worked with a record-breaking 11 sponsors, including SkipTheDishes, Samsung and Wendy’s, for season 12. “That’s partly from Insight working closely with the sales department at Corus and growing that aspect of our business,” says Brunton. The same is true of Top Chef Canada, which already has more sponsors signed up than ever before for season 11.

Brunton is now trying to integrate that same concept into more of his productions, including live TV like the Junos. “We try to be good partners with our broadcasters, to help maximize the economics of the shows and bring in as much revenue as we can,” says Brunton. He says he has been so successful at this, that Brunton is frequently fielding calls from other producers, asking him how they can do the same with their shows. He is now looking at how to offer this expertise as a service through Insight, bringing in more ancillary revenue to the company.

Brunton is always looking for new ways to expand his business and adapt with the landscape, which is why in 2018 his company was bought by Boat Rocker Media. Brunton is still a major shareholder with no changes to its operations, but Boat Rocker now owns the majority of Insight. “We’ve largely been left to our own devices to negotiate deals and maintain and build network relationships,” says Brunton. “We try to help each other and share information though.”

At Insight, both under Boat Rocker’s umbrella and before, Brunton has fostered a business model that’s uncommon in the production industry. Typically, production companies will hire legal and business admin teams as full-time salaried positions and creative positions are contract roles. However, Brunton has made sure that his producers, including Brock, are on his staff full-time, which allows them all more security to come up with big ideas and take risk. “Very early on, [Brunton] said that he was building a company of creatives, rather than having all of the showrunners and creative producers be freelancers, we are the senior management of the company,” says Brock. “He made sure that creative talent was on staff, which creates an environment for great creativity.”

While everyone is encouraged to take risks, Brunton also runs his company by encouraging everyone to be radically honest, says Lindsay Cox, another SVP and showrunner at Insight, who has produced 23 Juno Awards with Brunton to date. “If you have a challenge on set that your broadcaster needs to know about, you call them immediately,” says Cox. “You don’t slow down and try to spin it, you pick up the phone and resolve the issue by being a partner.”

Brunton also makes sure to share the good news, too. If he is ever able to pull together extra tax credits or funding, he always shares that with production partners and broadcasters, according to Cox. That has earned Brunton a lot of friends over the years in the Canadian broadcasting space, which is one of the many reasons that broadcasters are always willing to hear his newest pitch, or go to him first when they need help tackling a big live event, like the Tragically Hip concert, she adds.

One live event that Brunton didn’t work on that still haunts him is the Olympics. When the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver were in the planning stages, Brunton was sure he was going to get the call to lead the opening and closing ceremonies’ broadcast. Instead, an Australian company was hired, which had worked on a previous Olympics. If the games ever return to Canada, Brunton is hoping that call will finally come.

In the meantime, he is characteristically very busy. Brock, Cox and Williams all agree that Brunton never rests. He is always looking for his next project, next format and next genre to dive into. One area that Brunton has, thus far, stayed away from is a classic nature documentary in the style of David Attenborough. But when he was on a vacation in Kenya last year, Brunton spent most of his safari thinking of fresh takes on the format. Even when on vacation, he rarely takes a break.

“This is such a big award that it feels like an end-of-career, lifetime achievement, but there are many more chapters for [Brunton],” says Cox.

This story originally appeared in Playback‘s Spring 2024 issue

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