JTS' first producing role was as host of a late night talk show for The WB at age 19, creating "Thursday Evening with Jason and Dave," a weekly series carried by his hometown affiliate KSLO TV 20.
He and comedy partner Dave Crotser wrote and performed stand up monologues, variety show sketches, and live celebrity interviews, as a follow up to their successful run as weekly bulletin moderators for their high school and publishers of a popular local zine.
Learning how to load in commercials during breaks and how to edit off tape to tape decks at the station, JTS was suddenly well versed in prep, production and post, as well as marketing, by successfully selling ads for local businesses on his own telecast.
In moving to Los Angeles, JTS' first foray into the professional television industry was through CBS, working on a new series merging online with traditional broadcast, known as "Big Shot Live", where hopeful participants would self record submission videos looking for their big shot in Hollywood. Learning how to both shoot and upload segments, in addition to handling cast, JTS was later promoted into post production on "The Amazing Race," handling the hundreds of shot tapes from around the world. JTS would soon depart CBS as a producer for ABC.
Following his stint at ABC producing a reality reimagining of The Newlywed Game called "Here Come the Newlyweds," JTS became an on staff hire at boutique shingle Intuitive Entertainment, overseeing production on over a dozen series concurrently, and heading up creative on a brand new series for Discovery's Animal Planet called "Pit Boss." In producing all six seasons, JTS learned how to manage locations, liaise with talent, card out story, field direct, and even operate camera. "Pit Boss" was an instant hit for Animal Planet, spawning a myriad of similar programming on the fledgling cable network.It was within this new frontier of reality show cable television networks that JTS began to flourish, producing 100s of episodes or programming across multiple entertainment brands and production companies.
From "The Millionaire Matchmaker" to "Preachers of LA" to "What Would Ryan Lochte Do?", JTS served as a producer on several new series, eventually landing at VH1's "Basketball Wives" which proved rather popular. This notion of franchising, where reality shows begat new offshoot series, became a staple of all network offerings. "Preachers of LA" grew to include "Preachers of Detroit," and so on. Eventually, It was time to turn away from the project by project workload and take on multiple series at once, and create a platform from which to launch them.
Known for his own early entry in streaming, JTS was hired to help guide the creation of The Zeus Network, an influencer based OTT streaming platform of pure content originals. Producing nearly 40 new series within just six months, the network launched in summer of 2018 and quickly grew its subscriber base, leaving wannabe competitors like Jeffrey Katzenberg's Quibi in the dust of history. JTS was named co-executive producer on Zeus content, and served as the company's first VP of Programming, guiding the company's slate into early 2020, stepping down to be with family as the Covid crisis took hold.
