Jason Katims
Jason Katims
Jason Katimsis an American television writer, producer, and playwright. He is best known for being the head writer and executive producer of both Friday Night Lights, on which he won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series in 2011 for his work on the series finale, and Parenthood. He has also worked on Relativity, which he created and wrote for; Roswell, which he developed, produced and wrote for; Boston Public, which he co-wrote; Pepper Dennis; About...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth30 November 1960
CountryUnited States of America
That's the thing that I've always kind of kept in the back of my head in writing about teens, that everything is so important, all the time, every day. Every day of your life, you're changing and making decisions and everything is an emergency to you.
It's so funny because a lot of times we'll have these discussions as writers, and you feel like you're having a discussion with your wife: 'I don't know. Are they ready to have another baby? Is it time? Well, she's not getting any younger.'
I came to NBC on 'Friday Night Lights' and they have supported that show and found ways - unprecedented ways - to keep it on the air for a long time. And when I came to them with the idea of doing 'Parenthood,' they not only supported me in doing it but also got behind it in such a way that we were able to put together this incredible cast.
How do you do something where you're able to be specific and edgy enough to compete with what the cable networks are doing and, at the same time, appeal to a broader audience? That's the line that everyone in network television is trying to tread.
I think that the one thing about 'Parenthood' is that, while it's never been a huge out-of-the-box hit, it's always been solid. We've always kept our audience.
Because of streaming, serialized television has become less of a dirty word when you're pitching shows. I had to fight for that for so long as someone who's always gravitated towards ongoing story lines with characters that evolved and changed and storylines that continued over longer arcs.
What's fun about comedy is you're pushing things a little further than you would in a drama; you're pushing reality a little bit more.
The stories in 'Parenthood' are so much the stories of our lives. And the people who have worked on the show feel very connected to these characters.
The environment in a writer's room, I've really come to feel, should be some form of democracy.
The 'Moonlighting' tension of the couple that obviously never can get together, there's an innate sort of fun and tension in that.
If nobody has really done a show about people in their twenties that has been successful, why?
My first job in television was on 'My So-Called Life.'
I'm not somebody who goes online after every episode airs because that would be, for me, getting too much feedback and too much information.
Something that I learned from 'Friday Night Lights,' sometimes if you have four or five scenes in an episode, it's not having less than having 10. It's what you do with those scenes.