‘The Last Drive-In With Joe Bob Briggs’ Renewed For “Supersized” Sixth Season At Shudder — Here’s What The Horror Host Has Planned
EXCLUSIVE: Joe Bob is back in town — not that he ever left — as the genre-focused streaming service Shudder has opted not to slash, but to extend his virally popular horror variety series, The Last Drive-in with Joe Bob Briggs, bringing it back for a “supersized” sixth season.
Officially kicking off September 15th with a special touting the launch of The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon, which had director, EP and key franchise creative Greg Nicotero as its special guest, the new season will see Briggs host and dissect more than 30 films, which is a new record. The world’s foremost drive-in movie critic, Briggs will next be back for two Halloween-themed specials in October, a holiday special in December, and a Valentine’s Day special in February, before transitioning to a new series format in March 2024.
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Whereas Briggs’ signature movie watch parties have thus far been a double-feature experience, and more of this kind of programming can certainly be expected up ahead, he’ll primarily pivot now to spotlighting single titles, streaming every other Friday night. The good news is that over the course of the next year, he’ll have more of a consistent presence on Shudder than he ever has before, having previously appeared in just two blocks of 5-6 episodes streaming from April through midsummer, and on a few other special occasions annually.
Originally taping in Texas before migrating to New Jersey during the pandemic, the show has this season gone on the move again, setting up shop at the Senoia, Georgia studios where the Walking Dead series have filmed, with access to a backlot for the first time.
“As everyone knows, you should never invite me into your home, because I always show up,” joked Briggs in a statement to Deadline. “Shudder has graciously invited me to stick around for a sixth year, and I intend to use that kindness to haunt your phones, laptops and big-screen TVs with the most ghastly examples of perversity in the history of cinema. Plus a few old jokes and some celebrity guests who will still return our phone calls. Put it all together and it spells PARTAY.”
Added AMC Networks’ Executive Vice President of Streaming, Courtney Thomasma, “We’re delighted to bring Joe Bob, Darcy and the rest of The Last Drive-In Team back for our biggest season yet of crazy, scary and crazy-scary movies and specials, with the most entertaining commentary on TV. Joe Bob will be hosting more movie nights than any previous season and we can’t wait to continue the Friday night party with our Shudder family.”
For the uninitiated, The Last Drive-in is a show through which Briggs hosts an eclectic range of horror movies, from the mainstream to the highly obscure, ranting lovingly about their merits, histories and significance to genre cinema, alongside sidekick Darcy the Mail Girl (aka Diana Prince). Hosted segments interspersed throughout the films he’s showcasing feature everything from comedic bits to compelling trivia, as well as sit-downs with creatives whose first-hand knowledge can more directly contextualize what’s being screened.
In a recent interview with Deadline, Briggs joked that before The Last Drive-in debuted in 2018, he’d been “off the air for centuries.” In actuality, it should be stated, the speaker is John Bloom, the veteran movie critic who invented the redneck comedic persona of Joe Bob during his time at the Dallas Times Herald, later writing in his voice for outlets like The New York Times, before inhabiting him on TV.
After hosting the popular variety series Joe Bob’s Drive-in Theater and MonsterVision throughout the ’80s and ’90s for The Movie Channel and TNT, respectively, Bloom had for the most part leaned back into the more ‘serious’ side of his career as an investigative journalist. But nonetheless, about once a year, for many years, he’d be approached by a new producer for another show of some sort. “This is sort of the secret to the revival of my career,” he said with a laugh. “People who watched me when they were kids are now running the networks.” Nothing ever materialized until Troma alum Matt Manjourides introduced him to the team at Shudder — and even then, the project evolved in fits and starts, falling apart before coming back together.
Briggs originally intended to do a Labor Day marathon for the service, “like the old Jerry Lewis telethon where nobody sleeps for three days,” as his “farewell” to hosting, but that opportunity almost disappeared following an internal shakeup at Shudder. “They changed the whole company and cut a lot of stuff back,” Briggs recalled. “They were still sort of ready to do it, and then at the last minute we got this call where they said, ‘We really can’t do this. We don’t want to spend this kind of money.'” He was subsequently offered a budget of $30,000 for a marathon of more limited scope, and was inclined to pass. But then Manjourides came back to him and revealed that Shudder’s crew had agreed to work for free, in order to free up some space in the budget, such that more of the money allotted would show up on screen in the final product. “And I said, ‘Well, f**k you,'” Briggs laughed. “‘Now, I have to do it.'”
In between the announcement of the 27-hour marathon and its airing starting Friday, July 13th, 2018, Briggs was taken aback by a flurry of social media activity, with everyone from Stephen King to the everyday ‘mutant’ (as he calls his fans) vowing to tune in. Then, the night of the taping, he crashed Shudder’s servers. “I didn’t understand the significance of that, actually, and I was with Darcy. We’d just done a promotional event the night before, and Darcy says, ‘Hey, the whole Shudder system went down! And a couple of other [AMC-owned] websites went down, too,” Briggs recalled. “I said, ‘Well, that’s disappointing. Because I kind of wanted people to see the show.’ And she said, ‘No! This is the best thing that could ever happen.'”
Cisco Systems worked through the night to get the show back on the air, and when it finally came back online, near midmorning the next day, people were still around, hungry to watch the films he’d helped program. A true labor of love, the marathon was filmed in a borrowed room within the factory used to film the tattoo reality series Ink Master, out in the boonies in New Jersey. But it wouldn’t take long after Briggs’ “big victory” to be granted more resources. And it was this night that sealed his fate as one of Shudder’s most important brand ambassadors, a horror host who is here to stay. The show’s most recent season concluded July 21st, and while specifics as to ratings are kept in a black box, as at other streamers, each new episode trended in the Top 10 nationally on Twitter every Friday night.
When initially asked to do more episodes, Briggs said, “I had just published a book and still kind of had my feet in both worlds, so it was like trying to turn around an aircraft carrier, to switch from serious journalism back into movie hosting.” Still, he admits that his time with the show has been “a fun ride,” even if it’s been a learning curve in more than one sense, as he’s looked to adapt to an ever-evolving culture. “It’s been amazing because when I was young, I was considered sort of the bad boy on TV. I was always getting in trouble,” Briggs recounted. “It’s really strange because when I was first on The Movie Channel starting in the ’80s and then on TNT for years in the ’90s, they would always say, ‘You can’t say this. You can’t do this. You can’t broadcast this because you’re going to offend the older people, Job Bob.’ And then the notes I would get at Shudder are like, ‘You can’t do this. You can’t say that because you’re going to offend the younger people, the millennials and the post-millennials.'”
Notes of this sort left him asking, “Well, what the f**k?” he said, laughing. “Is there no period in history where you can just make jokes about everything?” Also driving his befuddlement, he explained, is that some jokes he would have been scolded for back in the ’80s wouldn’t lead to the batting of an eye today, whereas other remarks he made back in the day that got him in no trouble could now get him cancelled. In any case, his experience at Shudder has been “educational,” and he vows now to “stay away from the danger areas,” as far as his own commentary, after coming to understand “the rules.” And fortunately, “with this incarnation of this show, I don’t understand why, but everybody loves us,” he said. “We don’t get in trouble at all. So I’m a little bit disappointed. Like, did I lose my edge?”
In dissecting the factors leading to The Last Drive-in‘s viral popularity, Briggs pointed to the way he uses films as “a jumping-off place for talking about other things in the culture,” and the refreshingly unpredictable experience he’s able to cultivate for fans, at a time when much of entertainment has become, in his view, either overly formatted or simply stale. The show is a platform for him to guide horror fans, from the less educated through to the most rabid, down roads not traveled in horror — and even, he jokes, “down some of the dark alleys along that road.”
While Briggs teases his movie(s) of the week on social media ahead of each Friday episode, he doesn’t reveal the exact titles he’s examining until the night of, in order to reenforce the understanding that his show is not about any particular destination, but about the journey. Longtime Shudder team member Sam Zimmerman, who serves as VP, Programming, kicks off the curation process each season, sussing out which films from yesteryear are available for licensing at a reasonable price tag, while scouring festivals for the latest and greatest in contemporary horror. Briggs also presents his wish list to Zimmerman, and once it’s clear which films will be viable for the streamer to pursue, selections are made as a team.
Some episodes hinge, Briggs noted, on “so-called ‘lost films from the ‘80s,'” which isn’t meant to reference titles of poor quality, but rather ones that nobody watched at the time, and few have watched since. One of the more satisfying aspects of the work he’s done with The Last Drive-in is the opportunity it’s afforded him to resurrect some of these films, and thereby influence culture at large. “What’s interesting is, sometimes we’ll have one of those on, and then I’ll see six months later, it’ll be on all the midnight shows at the Alamo Drafthouse and various theaters across the country,” Briggs said. “One of them we did like that was Demon Wind. The audience was not clamoring for Demon Wind, but we showed it anyway.”
As previously alluded to, Briggs has had an unusually versatile career, writing about everything from B-movies to America’s casinos, sex and the Iridium satellite constellation. Interestingly, he also co-wrote the 1984 book Evidence of Love: The Candy Montgomery Story, which has been adapted into an Emmy-winning CBS TV movie, starring Barbara Hershey, as well as multiple series. The latest, Max’s miniseries Love & Death, starred Elizabeth Olsen as axe murderer Montgomery and just a few months ago landed Jesse Plemons an Emmy nom for his supporting role as Candy’s adulterous husband, Allan. (“I think of the [adaptations], the Max version is the closest to the book,” he said, “which means I like it the best.”)
Looking ahead, Briggs hopes to reprint his books that have been out of circulation, after seeing them skyrocket to sales in the hundreds of dollars from just a buck following his own personal resurrection on Shudder. But that aside, he’s primarily focused on continuing to “try to perfect” the show he’s already doing. He’s already checked off many of the movies on his ‘too grizzly for cable’ list following his transition to hosting in the strange new world of streaming, where he can let his freak flag fly. And he hopes to one day soon return with another marathon. “Today, it would cost a lot more than $30,000. I’ll just leave it at that,” laughed Briggs. “But I do wish that one of these years, on the anniversary of the marathon, we can do another marathon. Maybe we can’t do 13 movies, maybe we can do six or something. But I would love to do that again.”
Created for Shudder by Briggs, Austin Jennings, and Manjourides, The Last Drive-in is produced by Manjourides and Justin Martell and directed by Austin Jennings.
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