John Markus is an Emmy award winning writer and producer and barbecue competitor with a Jambo stick burner. He, more than anyone, has popularized competition barbecue among the masses with his TV productions. In 2013 the Kansas City Barbeque Society gave him a PhB, its highest honor.
It all started with a partnership with Chris Lilly (see my interview with him here) and a 13 part competition broadcast called the "All Star BBQ Showdown" in 2006. It morphed into nine episodes of "The National BBQ Championship" and finally emerged as "BBQ Pitmasters", the popular and controversial competition series that continues today on Destination America.
At air time he was putting the finishing touches on "The Kings of BBQ Barbecue Kuwait", a documentary film chronicling the mission of cooking barbecue for our troops stationed in The Mideast (no pork). It will premier in late summer 2015.
Markus wrote or co-wrote 67 episodes of "The Cosby Show", earning an Emmy, a Peabody, back-to-back Humanitas prizes, and a People's Choice award for "The Greatest Sitcom of All Time". He next co-created the Cosby spin-off "A Different World", which ran for six seasons on NBC. He has also written or produced for Al Franken, Michael Keaton, Jim Belushi, Garry Shandling, Ellen, Earl Wilson, and more.
His play, co-written with Mark St. Germain, called "The Fabulous Lipitones", debuted at Theatrical Outfit in Atlanta in Spring of 2013 and is being produced in theatres across the nation. It is the story of a barbershop quartet that loses its lead singer to a strenuously high B-flat.
In our Seminar a surprisingly candid Markus shares behind the scenes looks, the inside scoop on some of the competitors (there is no love lost between him and Myron Mixon), some dirt on the judges, insight into "reality" TV and how it works, and why he thinks "we are in the final chapters of BBQ on TV".
He also talks briefly about The Cosby Show, and about how a friend's awful ribs set him on the path to becoming a BBQ expert, competitor, and TV producer.
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