Raised in the United States, John Rogers moved to Montreal to get his theoretical physics degree and wound up staying. In 1988, he started performing stand-up as a hobby. Within a year, he was invited to perform at the International Just For Laughs Comedy Festival, the largest all-comedy event in the world. At Just For Laughs, a booker for the Melbourne Comedy Festival spotted Rogers and brought him out to Australia as part of a three-man show which ran for two months. When he returned to North America, Rogers honed his routine in the competitive Boston comedy scene. Along the way, he tended bar, slept in his car and on couches and co-wrote a comedy show on a Boston Top 10 radio station. After another four years of touring – headlining clubs in both Canada and the U.S., performing at over 200 colleges and special corporate shows – Rogers appeared in the Just For Laughs Showtime Special and signed a six-episode sitcom development deal with CBS where he starred in the CBS/Touchstone Televi
Raised in the United States, John Rogers moved to Montreal to get his theoretical physics degree and wound up staying. In 1988, he started performing stand-up as a hobby. Within a year, he was invited to perform at the International Just For Laughs Comedy Festival, the largest all-comedy event in the world. At Just For Laughs, a booker for the Melbourne Comedy Festival spotted Rogers and brought him out to Australia as part of a three-man show which ran for two months. When he returned to North America, Rogers honed his routine in the competitive Boston comedy scene. Along the way, he tended bar, slept in his car and on couches and co-wrote a comedy show on a Boston Top 10 radio station. After another four years of touring – headlining clubs in both Canada and the U.S., performing at over 200 colleges and special corporate shows – Rogers appeared in the Just For Laughs Showtime Special and signed a six-episode sitcom development deal with CBS where he starred in the CBS/Touchstone Television pilot In the Mood. As a stand-up, Rogers has starred in two of his own network comedy specials, he has received three Gemini-Award nominations and The Montreal Gazette has hailed him as “one of the funniest people on the planet.”
When his pilot was somehow left off the CBS fall schedule, it was not long before Rogers found himself in the employ of CBS once again – this time as a writer, where he moved from staff writer to producer in three years. Rogers then spent a decade working on television and film projects. In television, he created the Sony animated series Jackie Chan Adventures with Jackie Chan, which became a runaway hit on the Kids WB, airing 99 episodes. In film, Rogers worked on over 15 projects, including the original screenplay for 2007’s Transformers. In 2010, he created the digital content company Thrillbent with Eisner Award-winning comic book writer Mark Waid to develop creator-owned content for graphic novels, film and television.
Between 2008 and 2012, he created and ran Leverage, which ran for five seasons and won a People’s Choice Award for its fifth and final season. In 2014 he created The Librarians for TNT, the number one cable premiere for the year, and ran four seasons. With his new production company Kung Fu Monkey, Rogers created The Player for NBC in 2015 and has a dozen shows in development with Sony, Netflix, BBC Worldwide, The Jim Henson Company and Lionsgate. Most recently, he developed the Lionsgate/Showtime TV series The Kingkiller Chronicles, an adaptation of the worldwide best-selling fantasy novel franchise of the same name by Patrick Rothfuss. He is currently a consulting producer on the IMDb TV reimagination of Leverage. His next movie, Marry Me, which Rogers co-wrote and co-produced, stars Jennifer Lopez and Owen Wilson and will be released in the Spring of 2021
