Showrunner Transcript: Jason Katims (“Parenthood,” “Friday Night Lights”)
In conjunction with the annual broadcast network upfronts, New York magazine is running a series called “Showrunner Transcripts.” We will feature one each day for two weeks on GITS. What’s a showrunner? For a primer, you can go here to Wikipedia. The short answer: “The person who is responsible for the day-to-day operation of a television series.” It’s more than just managing a series. Someone has to guarantee to a network they can deliver 12, 22, or however many episodes for which the series is contracted. That’s the bottom line of a showrunner’s reality.
Today: Jason Katims (“Parenthood,” “Friday Night Lights”).
Parenthood and Friday Night Lights are both so good at depicting family realistically, and so was My So-Called Life . Were you predisposed to be interested in family as a subject?
I think I was always interested in that. I think I’m very lucky to be able to be doing television where those are the concerns of the show. The concerns are really relationships between a parent and their teenage daughter or a marriage or raising young kids. I feel really lucky that that’s what I get to tell stories about all the time because I think, in a lot of shows, it’s 70 percent or 80 percent storytelling, procedural storytelling, and maybe 20 to 30 percent character stuff. 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.
What are some keys to depicting families so believably?
One of the things I find myself saying in the writers’ room a lot is, “What would really happen?” A lot of times as writers you want to come up with the best possible story and you bend it according to what you want to happen. I think one of the things that I always try to think about is what would really happen in a situation, what feels real. One of the other attitudes I always sort of use, which I learned working for Winnie and Marshall, is everybody’s best foot forward. I feel that people are basically trying to do their best in the world. Even when you see people making mistakes, you understand why they’re making a mistake. Everybody has flaws, everybody has demons, everybody has ghosts, but I think you watch people and you see everybody trying to do their best. To me, that’s compelling and it sort of reflects what I typically see that happens in the world too.
For more of the article, go here.