Cadence Chats with Canada’s Greatest Know-It-All Creator Brad Brough

Having gained such a considerable amount of documentary and competition reality-TV production experience (his credits include such franchise shows as Canada’s Next Top Model), it was only a matter of time before Brad Brough — whom Cadence recently had the chance to speak with — took a step further and created Canada’s Greatest Know-It-All, a concept all his own.

Granted, it doesn’t exactly break the competition reality-series mold, but with its unique balance of documentary insight and reality show entertainment, it certainly brings new life to it.

Not only that, the eight-part series — which premieres Monday, January 30 at 10 p.m. ET/PT on Discovery — boasts what viewers will surely agree is a commanding and charismatic host in the much-accomplished actor, bull rider, and horse trainer that is Daniel Fathers (Pontypool, Heartland).

In conversation, Mr. Brough provided much insight into Know-It-All’s genesis and what it’s like to work with some of the country’s quirkiest intellects.

What inspired the concept for the show?

I have been producing TV shows for Discovery Channel — I’ve done other shows — and sort of got to know Discovery Channel viewers and discovered that a lot of viewers are in fact, pridefully, know-it-alls; and that’s one of the reasons they watch the Discovery Channel. They can learn stuff and wake up the next morning, stand around the water cooler and say, “You know what the fastest shark is? It’s the Mako shark,” right? That’s sort of the Discovery Channel viewer — that, coupled with the fact that, like everyone else, I just know a lot of know-it-alls — and there’s a couple specifically — and I thought, “You know, it would be interesting to put these people to the task . . . make ‘em prove all the stuff that he or she knows.”

You mentioned you made other shows for Discovery — you did Patent Bending as well — and, even with your film Adventures in Pornland (about an ambitious Canadian film-maker), ambition seems to be a running theme for you. What fascinates you about that concept?

I never thought about that . . . not too deeply. I guess it’s somewhat based in my own background — I’m from a very small town, had a very blue-collar upbringing, from a place where you’re sort of expected to escape and achieve things. I’m being sort of cynical about it, but I like the idea of “the everyman rising up,” having the opportunity to have a good idea and being able to actually execute it and succeed. Sort of that blue-collar, blue-sky thinking I sort of subscribe to personally. And I guess that’s become a theme.

Back to Canada’s Greatest Know-It-All, what drew you to Daniel Fathers as a host?

Well we threw the casting net across North America, actually, and we got, literally, hundreds of responses from all kinds of hosts — and there are all kinds of hosts out there, believe me. The one thing we really didn’t want for Discovery Channel or the show — in respect to what I was just talking about, that blue-collar sort of world — is a teeth-and-gums kind of host. You know, shiny and bright, stands on the right mark, says the lines and it’s transparent, right?

I wanted a guy who could live and breathe it and who felt it, and Daniel is that. He’s a really good actor by trade — and actors can be scary people because they can be those “just-hit-your-line-and-mark” kind of people that aren’t really invested. But when I met Daniel, I discovered he is somewhat of a renaissance man himself. Here’s a guy who’s done Shakespeare and musicals on stage, and he rides a Harley and bulls — his new thing is that he’s a bull rider, of all things (I hope he doesn’t kill himself) — he breaks horses; he raises horses; he’s in business. . . . In the executive world, he’s just done a lot of stuff and is very curious. He’s a very honest, open person, but he also has an authority to him. He has an edge to him that we needed to work with these very strong 10 personalities.

Speaking of those personalities, you must have received many applicants, so how tough was it to narrow them down to the 10 there are today?

It was very difficult because . . . the show’s not called Canada’s Smartest Person — that’s a different show that’s cropped up since this show — and the reason we didn’t call it Canada’s Smartest Person is because we didn’t wanna put ourselves in a box and have a MENSA program where there’s this quantifiable . . . you know, write-the-test-and-win-the-prize-and-win-the-title kind of thing.

Being a know-it-all is really a state of mind, and we didn’t want to define it. We wanted the show to define what a know-it-all is — and know-it-all comes with a jagged edge to it; it’s a double-edged sword. It’s the kind of person that, you know, you pick up the phone and call when you have a problem or you’re in a jam, but you know they’re never gonna let you forget that you had to call them, right? That’s what we were looking for in people — really smart people, really diverse backgrounds, and strong personalities. Also, we didn’t go out and just get 10 people who were gonna yell at each other and say, “I’m right! I’m right!” . . . We’ve got one character who is sort of the anti-know-it-all. He’s very humble and very self-effacing and really doesn’t believe in himself, but he’s really smart and really, really capable. We’ve got a naval nuclear engineer from the US NAVY; we’ve got guys with multiple degrees; we’ve got a Grade Nine dropout — and that’s the interesting part, we’ve discovered that these people play on par, but in completely different ways, because their brains function in different ways. We were looking for diversity of process — of how they process information — as well as personality.

You raise a good point, know-it-all is a tough term to define. There are those who are self-conscious of their know-it-all-ism and those who, like you said, don’t quite believe in themselves and others tell them they’re know-it-alls.

Absolutely. In that respect . . . some were on the phone and nominating themselves within 10 hours of the casting call going out. And others were surprised to find that their family members or friends nominated them without knowing it because they were too shy or wouldn’t call themselves know-it-alls, but their friends do, as a compliment, right? . . . We’ve taken the license to have a subjectivity to the show and to the narrative of the show. It almost has this anthropological feel to it, almost like a social experiment where we have the license as producers to say, “Okay, so here’s the scenario. Here are these people . . . here’s this interesting species known as know-it-all. Let’s see how they tick; let’s see how they react.” The show is about the challenges, about the science, about the problem-solving; but it’s really about how these know-it-alls interact with each other in the course of that, and how they react emotionally, how they work in teams, how they work individually, how they fight for the conch, so to speak — you know, to control the situation. What happened was that things emerged in different scenarios — in respect to how these personalities solved these problems together — and that’s the interesting part of the show to me.

That brings me back to something I heard Dan say on one of the behind-the-scenes features on the show’s sight — the aim is to be both informative and entertaining. Was it tough to find that balance, or was that something that grew organically?

it was tough developing it because we didn’t know what we were gonna get, right? The worst-case scenario was that we made a really smart, boring show — really geeky, boring, and that no one cared about Pi-R-Square-this and trigonometry-that. The other worst-case scenario was that we had this really interesting, dynamic show, but just was “another” reality show based in sort of the soap opera world. Yeah, it was incredibly challenging trying to make a smart show that got information across and that the viewers played along with at home and yelled at the TV — as well as a cast with a bunch of people that the challengers would require emotional game-play of, right?

To answer your question, yeah, we created it and really had to follow the plot closely once we went into production — and change and adapt every single day because these 10 people arrived with . . . you know, these aren’t typical reality-TV competitors who just want their 15 minutes, these are people that have their own particular agendas. They call themselves know-it-alls and we agreed. And so they arrived and once they got together, they thought they were smarter than us. They were trying to figure us out — as a TV-production, as producers, as the creators of the challenges, as a group, off-camera, all the time. They’d be poking holes in our challenges. They’d be fishing around with crew members, trying to get clues as to what’s happening. One guy, Dave Spencer (one of our competitors), had actually done some drive-bys. He’d figured out our locations . . . he had pulled the blueprints of our studio; he Google-Earthed both of our locations; he’d drafted out the location . . . They knew everything about me, they googled me down to my core, every project I’d done. They knew all the key people, what projects they’d done — and so it became this sort of really fun competition between us and the know-it-alls.

Like you said, you didn’t know what you were going to get when it came to casting, and not only that — as was noted in the behind-the-scenes feature — this is the first show of its kind; so how nerve-wracking was it to go out there and bring it to life?

Well, it’s probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done on TV for that reason specifically. But, having said that, I’ve done a lot of very large-scale projects for TV, show’s like Canada’s Next Top Model . . . I understand scale, I understand character, I understand how to put the machine together to make these shows. But like you said, when we did Top Model, there was a blueprint that we were able to follow and then adapt to and make our own. But this was brand new . . . For me, it was really challenging and really stressful, but I love to do, right . . . It’s not reinventing the wheel here; it’s another competition reality series. But there’s newness to it,. There is freshness to it. And that’s, for me, the really inspiring thing.

These people ARE know-it-alls, but as we’ve mentioned, their ambitions do ring true. What have you taken away from working on the show with these people and Dan?

Probably the biggest thing I’ve learned is that there are many ways to skin a cat, so to speak, right? In life . . . there’s not just one solution to a problem. There are typically multiple solutions to the same problem but, conversely, multiple ways just to f*** things up, right? Working as a team, you’ve gotta pick your battles, you’ve gotta pick your spots, you’ve gotta pick who you’re gonna listen to, and when and how you apply it. I think it’s sort of opened up my brain to [pause] people think in completely different ways, but can land in the same spot, and there is no one right way to do any particular problem.

Visit Discovery Channel’s Canada’s Greatest Know-It-All page for more info.

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