Paul Gasek, Storytelling for TV: Win Some, Lose Some

It’s true that Paul Gasek has had successes and won awards, including a pair of Emmys. But not all stories get told, even good ones. Gasek will tell the stories of four story proposals that never made it to air: An ocean series, an opal mining series, a 4-parter on the Red Sea, and another 4-parter on one of America’s modern dance icons. Gasek will share the stories, and what happened to them, as an insight into documentary filmmaking.

Paul Gasek is an Emmy award-winning Producer, Director, Writer, and Narrator with 40 years’ experience in broadcast television. From 2006 to 2011, he was Executive Producer and Senior Science Editor at Discovery Channel, supervising the production of hundreds of hours for the channel, including six seasons of Deadliest Catch and many of the blue chip Discovery/BBC Science co-productions. Between 2015 and 2018, he was Executive Producer of Shark Week, Discovery’s longest running series in its 30th year.

The rest of the time, Gasek is owner and director of Stony Brook Films, located in Brewster, Massachusetts. He writes, story-edits, and reversions programming for indie production companies making shows for National Geographic Television, NGWILD, Discovery Channel, Animal Planet, History Channel, PBS, NHK, The Weather Channel, Travel Channel, Beijing New Century Media, HGTV, BBC America, and many others. Gasek specializes in science stories, specifically natural history, climate, ecology, and fisheries.