Briggs on his experience at the cable networks:
https://25yearslatersite.com/2018/06/13/an-oral-history-and-interview-with-joe-bob-briggs/
[I was blessed at both networks because I had very little oversight. Weekend late nights were not a big priority at The Movie Channel or at TNT, so I had no time restrictions and very little censorship. The only time I can remember a reshoot is one of our Christmas shows at The Movie Channel. The idea was that I would bring together all the major religions for a season of peace on Earth—so we had a Baptist preacher, a Catholic priest, a rabbi, and a Unitarian feminist gathered together in a dive bar—and we were supposedly breaking bread together and discussing what we had in common. Then at some point the Baptist preacher says to the rabbi, “We forgive the Jews for killing Jesus,” and he says it very sweetly, and it actually got a big laugh from the crew—and then the four clerics start arguing and it turns into a brawling fistfight. So that was the joke, but the network objected to the one line—“We forgive the Jews for killing Jesus”—and so we had to reshoot a milder version. I would occasionally get called on the carpet for being politically incorrect, but it was a politically incorrect character so that didn’t really make sense, and I would sometimes get flagged for words that were on the Turner Networks forbidden list. If this happened, I would make up a nonsense word to replace it—and then, in some cases, the nonsense word would turn up on the forbidden list! I used to smoke cigars on the Movie Channel show, but all tobacco was forbidden at TNT. But the greatest freedom at both places—I don’t think this exists anywhere on television today—is that I could finish whenever I wanted to, without any set time limit. At TNT we usually had a double feature, and as long as we were done by 6 a.m., they were fine with it. We could finish at 3, 4, 5, or 3:57, they didn’t care. This benign indifference meant the rants could go on forever, the breaks could be as long as we decided they should be, etc. etc. etc. So I was very happy at both places because of a) creative control, and b) minimal oversight.]
Sounds like the kind of tv network Lester Bangs once wrote about in the 1970s where some freaks take over a studio by force and show things like The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Suddenly Stopped Living And Became Mixed Up Zombies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Incredibly_Strange_Creatures_Who_Stopped_Living_and_Became_Mixed-Up_Zombies
The rock critic Lester Bangs wrote an appreciative 1973 essay about Incredibly Strange Creatures in which he tries to explain and justify the movie’s value:
...this flick doesn’t just rebel against, or even disregard, standards of taste and art. In the universe inhabited by The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies, such things as standards and responsibility have never been heard of. It is this lunar purity which largely imparts to the film its classic stature. Like Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and a very few others, it will remain as an artifact in years to come to which scholars and searchers for truth can turn and say, “This was trash!”[10]