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
crisis family health immediate life realize stop
One of the things you realize when you have a health crisis in your immediate family is that life does not stop so that you can go through that experience.
arguing breaking changing great happens life terrible
You're breaking up, you're getting together, you're changing your life, you're arguing with your parents, you're making terrible mistakes, you're having great triumphs. It's what happens to teenagers.
erroneous kinds shows telling
The shows I've been working on, especially 'Parenthood' and 'Friday Night Lights,' I think are completely character-driven stories. I think, for most writers, that's a privilege to be telling those kinds of stories. It's erroneous to me.
cast champagne crew directed drank episode final four huge last three toast wrapped wrote
I directed the next-to-last episode of 'Parenthood.' I wrote three of the four last episodes. I had the cast to my house. Had a champagne toast with the writers. Had a huge cast and crew party. Drank eggnog in the camera truck after we wrapped the final day. All that, and I don't really feel like I've said good-bye to 'Parenthood.'
coach exist marriage relationship saw understand until
In 'Friday Night Lights,' the relationship between the coach and his wife, that marriage was something that you couldn't really understand until you actually saw it exist on film.
certain forming life period ways written
Many of the things that I have written on have focused, at least a big part of the story, on adolescents. I think that in that period of life, so much happens, and it's the period of life where you're forming into an adult. In certain ways, you're already an adult and in certain ways you're still a kid.
familiar grabbed lives title
'Parenthood' is a story about people's lives - the title helps. Very early on during the show's launch, the title was something familiar for the audience. It grabbed people's interest.
changing emergency head kept life time
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.
five four less scenes
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.
airs episode feedback goes online somebody
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.
couple innate obviously sort
The 'Moonlighting' tension of the couple that obviously never can get together, there's an innate sort of fun and tension in that.
environment form
The environment in a writer's room, I've really come to feel, should be some form of democracy.
changed characters continued dirty evolved less longer ongoing pitching towards word
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.
authentic both coverage normally overlap shoot shot sides
We shoot with three cameras, try to shoot both sides of coverage if possible. That allows the actors to overlap and to find moments that feel more authentic and real than what you sometimes would normally get in a scripted drama that's shot more classically. And that's something in 'Parenthood' that has evolved.