Television
In 1986, as a result of the stage show, Joe Bob was asked to be a guest host on Drive-In Theater, a late- night B-movie show on The Movie Channel, sister network of Showtime. Briggs went over so well that he was eventually signed to a long-term contract. For fourteen movie introductions, he had a side-kick, actor/musician Chris Aable, host of a local Los Angeles TV Show, "Hollywood Today", who played himself while always surrounded by beautiful girls. In one episode at a mansion with Chris Aable and a dozen pretty girls in the swimming pool, Joe Bob stood beside the pool in his cowboy outfit and asked with his trademark redneck accent: "Chris, how come you always get all the women?" Joe Bob's Drive-In Theater became the network's highest-rated show and ran for almost ten years, and was twice nominated for the industry's Cable ACE Award. He appeared on some 50 talk shows, including The Tonight Show (twice) and Larry King Live. He was also a commentator for a Fox TV news magazine for two seasons.
Joe Bob's Drive-In Theater ended when the network changed format in early 1996. He was off the air for only four months before joining the TNT network, where he hosted MonsterVision for four years. That show ended in July 2000, when once again the network changed format. In 2011, the most definitive account of the Monstervision series as well as recent interviews with Briggs and Monstervision series mailgirl Honey Gregory appeared on the cult movie website, Mondo Video. In the late nineties he spent two seasons as a commentator on Comedy Central's The Daily Show (under his given name John Bloom), with a recurring segment called "God stuff" beginning on the 2nd ever episode in 1996. He starred in Frank Henenlotter's documentary Herschell Gordon Lewis - Godfather of Gore.
Read more about this topic: Joe Bob Briggs
Famous quotes containing the word television:
“It is among the ranks of school-age children, those six- to twelve-year-olds who once avidly filled their free moments with childhood play, that the greatest change is evident. In the place of traditional, sometimes ancient childhood games that were still popular a generation ago, in the place of fantasy and make- believe play . . . today’s children have substituted television viewing and, most recently, video games.”
—Marie Winn (20th century)
“The television screen, so unlike the movie screen, sharply reduced human beings, revealed them as small, trivial, flat, in two banal dimensions, drained of color. Wasn’t there something reassuring about it!—that human beings were in fact merely images of a kind registered in one another’s eyes and brains, phenomena composed of microscopic flickering dots like atoms. They were atoms—nothing more. A quick switch of the dial and they disappeared and who could lament the loss?”
—Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)
“We cannot spare our children the influence of harmful values by turning off the television any more than we can keep them home forever or revamp the world before they get there. Merely keeping them in the dark is no protection and, in fact, can make them vulnerable and immature.”
—Polly Berrien Berends (20th century)