CEO of Deep Field | Vendor Manager| profile owner | Content Strategy | Team Leadert | instructor | Listening is Leading
The Setup:
His mother kept asking the same question. When he was seven years old in Ann Arbor, Michigan, planted in front of the 4:30 movie on a perfectly good summer afternoon: “What’s going to happen to you? All you do is watch TV?” She asked again when he and his best friend took over the high school announcements and turned them into a production, complete with music, funny voices, and storylines that had nothing to do with cafeteria schedules. She asked again at the University of Windsor, where he was supposed to be studying Communications and English Literature but kept disappearing across the border to watch sports in Detroit. The question followed him like a running joke. It turns out the answer was one of the more interesting careers in Canadian broadcasting.
Craig Colby is the CEO of Deep Field Productions and the executive producer behind Unsolved Universe, a new astronomy series premiering on TVO in February 2026. He is a three-decade veteran of Canadian television who has run newsrooms (not exactly – I’ve run production departments),launched channels (I was part of teams that launched channels), built companies (overstating – founded companies), trained producers, written books, and turned a show about bull riding into a two-time Gemini Award winner (certainly not on my own. A lot of people worked on those. I’ll be in big trouble if you post it that way “and helped a production company turn a show about bull riding into a two-time Gemini winner).
The Education That Didn’t Come With a Diploma
Colby graduated from Windsor with two degrees, a BA in Communications and English Literature and a BBA, but the real curriculum started the moment he walked into TSN in 1989. Canada’s sports leader handed him the entry-level version of the job: producing highlight packs, cutting footage,(editors cut footage. I wasn’t an editor) learning the grammar of television one deadline at a time. He stayed for years. By the time he left, he was producing editions of Sportsdesk (I wasn’t in charge of the entire newsroom), the nightly sports news program that shaped how an entire generation of Canadians consumed sports.
Then he crossed into something different. Discovery Channel Canada was launching its first daily science news show, and Colby joined as a producer. He did not just survive the transition from sports to science. He thrived in it. Over the next decade, he wrote, directed, and produced his way up to Sex Files II, a 14-part series on the science of human sexuality that became the highest-rated series in Discovery Channel Canada’s history to that point. Episode one drew 448,000 viewers in its initial airing, the fifth highest-rated broadcast of any kind on the channel. The show sold internationally, including in the United Kingdom.
What that decade at Discovery gave him was something that no single job title captures: the ability to make complex subjects feel urgent and human to a general audience. Science is not inherently boring. It is just frequently explained by people who forget that the audience came for a story, not a lecture.
Eight People, Four Channels, Eighty-Five Million Dollars
In 2006, Colby joined High Fidelity HDTV as one of eight original employees. The company was launching the first four HD channels in Canada. Nobody had done it before. Nobody had a roadmap.
The company could not afford the most experienced people in the industry, so Colby did something that would define his career as much as any single production credit. He grew built the talent himself. He developed seminars on interviewing and writing, the two foundational skills that separate producers who can gather material from producers who can shape it into something an audience will watch. He ran viewing sessions where the team would watch each other’s work and give direct feedback. They watched other productions too, studying what worked and why.
“Since skill is built through good training, lots of reps, and feedback,” he says, “our producers got a lot better fast.”
The company also needed money, so Colby helped build the partnerships that generated it. A deal with Parks Canada produced two series and brought in meaningful cash contributions. Output deals with distribution companies provided advances that kept the operation moving . (I was a liaison with distribution companies but my boss John Panikkar negotiated the deals. He’s way better at that than I am) One of the projects he developed during this period, Hubble’s Canvas, was made for under $100,000 and sold into more than 20 countries. It spawned a follow-up series, Cosmic Vistas, which ran for multiple seasons and sold internationally as well.
Six years after those eight people walked into the building, High Fidelity HDTV sold for $85 million.
The Show That Was Almost Lost in Saskatchewan
After High Fidelity came Blue Ant Media, where Colby oversaw editorial content for Love Nature, the international nature streaming service and linear channel with Smithsonian Channel as a US partner. He was running productions across the globe. Then he lost the job.
He started Colbyvision, his own storytelling company, and the range of what followed tells you something important about how he thinks about the craft. He produced National Lacrosse League games for ESPN+ and TSN+. He oversaw video production for the Aga Khan Museum for nearly four years. He served as showrunner for a reality pilot at McGillivray Entertainment Media. He trained NLL sideline reporters in the methodology of interviewing. He wrote and self-published two books, one of which won the Canadian Book Club Awards in non-fiction and took silver medals in biography and sports non-fiction.
One of the most instructive stories from this period has nothing to do with a big commission or a famous name. It involves a production company in Saskatchewan, a show about bull riding, and a visit that changed the outcome of two seasons of television.
The production company behind Hell on Hooves had received their license very late in the process and went into production without fully understanding how bull riding works as a sport. They came back with strong individual pieces but no clear structure for how to assemble them into episodes that held together.
Colby flew out to Saskatchewan. He sat with the team and went through the material. He showed them a workable production schedule for a low-budget show. He restructured each episode. But the most important conversation was the one about what an ideal episode would look like if they had known at the start what they knew now.
“We talked about what an ideal episode would look like if we knew then what we knew now,” he says. “We did get another season, produced the show that way, and over the next two seasons won two Gemini Awards.”
That is the skill that runs through everything Colby has done: not just making shows, but seeing clearly what a show is trying to be and finding the structural and editorial decisions that let it get there.
The Problem Nobody in Canadian Television Wants to Say Out Loud
Now, with Deep Field Productions, Colby is working on a different kind of problem. Unsolved Universe, his astronomy series with partners Ivan Semeniuk and Dave Whyte, arrived on TVO in February 2026. The show exists, in part, because Colby and his partners were willing to find a way to make it without waiting for a funding environment that may not return to what it was.
He is direct about the state of the industry. “There are far fewer commissioners in Canada, and the world,” he says. “The ones who are left have less money.” His assessment of the options is equally blunt: partner with other producers and broadcasters, go after the major streamers with a large and expensive project, reduce costs and work with a smaller commission, or do it yourself. Deep Field chose a version of the last option.
The funding crisis in Canadian factual television is not a secret, but few people with Colby’s track record are willing to name it plainly and then keep working anyway. He has spent three decades building the skills, the relationships, and the creative judgment to make good content in difficult conditions. That is not a crisis strategy. It is just how he has always operated.
The boy in Ann Arbor who watched too much TV and spent too much time on the school announcements turned out to be building something all along. His mother’s question finally has an answer that fills ten pages.
Craig Colby is the CEO of Deep Field Productions and the executive producer of Unsolved Universe, based in Toronto, Ontario. (I also own colbyvision – my consulting, production, and publishing company). He works with broadcasters, production companies, and businesses to develop and produce factual and documentary content that reaches global audiences. To connect with Craig or learn more, visit www.linkedin.com/in/craig-colby–1225683 or www.colbyvision.net.
