Talbot has also written and produced PBS biographies of writers Dashiell Hammett, Beryl Markham, Ken Kesey, Carlos Fuentes, Maxine Hong Kingston and John Dos Passos.

Talbot guest-starred on many television programs in the late 1950s and early 1960s, including three episodes of Lassie, "Growing Pains," "The Flying Machine," and "The Big Race."

Talbot also played the role of Ronnie Kramer in "I Hit and Ran", a 1960 episode of the CBS's anthology series The DuPont Show with June Allyson.

On stage in 1960, Talbot co-starred as "Sonny" in William Inge's Dark at the Top of the Stairs with Marjorie Lord at the La Jolla Playhouse.

In an article for Salon.com in 1997, he looked back with a sense of humor about his past role on Leave It to Beaver:[9] In the interests of historical accuracy I should say that, yes, Gilbert was a troublemaker and an occasional liar, but my character was certainly no Eddie Haskell – that leering teenage hypocrite who spoke unctuously to parents ("Well, hello Mrs. Cleaver, and how is young Theodore today?")

Early in his career at KQED, Talbot produced two national PBS Peabody Award winners, Broken Arrow, about nuclear weapons accidents,[12] and The Case of Dashiell Hammett, a biography of the crime writer.

[13] During his time at KQED, Talbot produced local documentaries, as well as national PBS documentaries such as Namibia: Behind the Lines, South Africa Under Siege (a portrait of Nelson Mandela's ANC in exile), and The Gospel and Guatemala (an investigation with Elizabeth Farnsworth of Guatemala's presidential strongman Efraín Ríos Montt and his conservative evangelical U.S. supporters).

He also wrote and produced (or co-produced with Joan Saffa and Judy Flannery) several hour-long PBS biographies of noted writers, including: Dashiell Hammett, Ken Kesey, Beryl Markham,[14] Carlos Fuentes,[15] and Maxine Hong Kingston.

After leaving KQED in 1989, Talbot produced and co-wrote a PBS biography of John Dos Passos narrated by newsman Robert MacNeil and actor William Hurt.

With colleague Sharon Tiller, Talbot also oversaw the Emmy Award and Webby Award-winning Frontline World website and its online video series, Rough Cuts[24] Based at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism, Talbot and Tiller taught classes and helped identify and mentor the "next generation of video journalists" whose work was showcased on Frontline/World.

The pilot episode was presented to PBS by Oregon Public Broadcasting, airing in 2010 with stories about the Russian propaganda song "A Man like Putin," Afrobeat legend Fela Kuti, and Borat music composer Erran Baron Cohen, and a performance by fado singer Mariza.

[26] A second one-hour episode hosted by KQED aired nationally in 2012 with Wynton Marsalis, Youssou N'Dour, Julie Fowlis and Of Monsters and Men.

[27] Talbot was also the executive producer of a series of twenty Sound Tracks online music videos for PBS Digital and YouTube, including interviews with and performances by Levon Helm, Yuja Wang, Hélène Grimaud, KT Tunstall, Seun Kuti, Seu Jorge, Anoushka Shankar and Of Monsters and Men.

[28] Talbot's articles have appeared in Salon.com,[29] the Washington Post Magazine, The Nation, Mother Jones,[30] Rolling Stone, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Los Angeles Times.

[31] In the 1970s, he was a reporter, writer and editor for Internews and the International Bulletin, a radio and print foreign news service based in Berkeley, California.

[33] From 2012 to 2014, Talbot was senior producer for video projects at the Center for Investigative Reporting, including feature news stories and short documentaries for the PBS Newshour, Univision, KQED-TV in San Francisco, and The New York Times.

He commissioned filmmakers and arranged distribution of their films to a wide range of media outlets, including the PBS Newshour, The Atlantic, Salon and USA Today.

[45] His younger brother, David Talbot, is the author of several books, including Season of the Witch (about San Francisco in the 1960s and 1970s), and was the founder and original editor-in-chief of Salon.com.

His nephew, Joe Talbot, won the Best Director prize at Sundance for his debut feature film, The Last Black Man in San Francisco (2019).