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Jason Katims has worked on some of the best television shows, as both a writer, producer and director, in the last 20 years—My So Called Life, Friday Night Lights, and Parenthood. And he hasn't been afraid to genre hop. He's dabbled in sci-fi (Roswell), family dramas, teen dramas and twentysomething relationship angst (Relativity—the OG TV romcom). But no matter the show, everything that he's touched is infused with themes about community and family, and what really links people to one another. And it's always well-received.
Katims is now using his TV clout as an executive producer for Jessica Goldberg's The Path, which premieres on Hulu today. After being instantly sold by Goldberg's spec script, Katims helped develop the show before they took it to Hulu. The Path is a darker extension of much of Katims' previous work, following a family at the center of a cult who are struggling with their relationships and faith. With powerful performances from Aaron Paul, Michelle Monaghan, and Hugh Dancy as a charismatic cult leader, The Path promises to put Hulu's originals slate on the map for appointment television.
But Katims himself has traveled down a long path to get to this point. So in honor of his new show's release, Katims told all us all about his incredible television career over the years, show by show.
My So-Called Life
Seasons: 1
Years: 1994-95
I started out when I graduated from college by writing plays. I wasn’t really setting out to write television. I was in New York, where I grew up, and I was writing plays, and had been doing that for a bunch of years and then I got a call from Ed Zwick’s office, who had read one of my plays. I got on the phone with Ed, and he told me he liked my play, and I said, “Thanks.” And he said, “Do you know who I am?” And I said, “No, not really.”
I came out to L.A. and met with Ed and Marshall Herskovitz, and at that time they were just starting to develop My So-Called Life with Winnie Holzman. They introduced me to Winnie and we hit it off, and she made me a writer on her show. I haven’t stopped ever since.
There was no writer’s room on My So-Called Life—there’d be meetings—and there wasn’t a lot of full-time writers on staff. A lot of the writers who were there, they were consulting but they weren’t really there day to day. That actually wound up being this incredibly fortuitous thing for me because I was really one of the only writers that came in every day. And therefore, I got really close to Winnie and the cast, and really became a part of it. Normally, somebody who is a baby writer wouldn’t be able to go to all these meetings, and go to casting sessions, and be on set as much. It was great, like a graduate school experience for me.
It was also Winnie’s first time running a show, so she really let me into her process, and I learned so much from her. A lot of times, she would need to rewrite an episode or some scenes, and she would say, “Do you want to come help me rewrite this?” To this day, I really think what she wanted me there for was to keep her awake.
I wrote two episodes, and then I co-wrote with Winnie on one of them, and I worked on some drafts for the other ones. The episode I really feel was my breakthrough moment on the show was “Life of Brian,” where it goes into his voiceover, instead of Angela’s. It was only one of two times where the voiceover was not Angela’s. That was a very exciting moment for me, because I created what Brian’s voice was.
Winnie’s voice was so unique, and that’s what makes the show to this day. People still talk about this show because of the specificity of the characters. I was really just trying to envelop myself in that world of that show, and really get to hear as much as I could from Winnie about her ideas and her philosophies.
Relativity
Seasons: 1
Years: 1996-97
When we found out that My So-Called Life had been cancelled, Ed Zwick called me and asked if I would like to try to find a show to do with them, in the same mold of what Winnie had done—they would godfather it, and help me, but it would be my show.
I pitched the idea of building the show around this couple, this Romeo and Juliet relationship between these two people who are very different. We really liked the idea of that, and liked the idea of making it not only about that relationship, but these two very different families. I was very much excited and it was in my wheelhouse.
When the show got picked up by ABC, Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz were out of town on that day and there was a four or five day period where they weren’t there. It was so funny because I was literally like, sitting in an office thinking, what do I do? If My So-Called Life was graduate school, then Relativity was postgraduate school. It was the next stage. It was an absolutely wonderful experience to have. It was very tense, and I didn’t know how to do much. I had to learn from my mistakes—some things worked and some things didn’t. I remember the first time walking down to see the sets that were being built, and it was the most amazing feeling in the world.
Roswell
Seasons: 3
Years: 1999-2002
Roswell was the first thing that I did that was a genre piece. Not only had I not written anything, I wasn’t really a big science-fiction fan. This wasn’t something where I knew the rules of how these things worked. So it was having to steep myself in that, and have people around me who were fans and loved that genre to help me with it. The heart of what it was about and the themes were very similar to things like My So-Called Life, because it was really about teen experience.
As it went on, they really wanted us to be more sci-fi. One of my favorite network notes I’ve ever gotten was someone said, “Jason, the president of the network has a note he’d me to relay to you from him—aliens, aliens, aliens.” But what attracted me to it was this theme of alienation, and how when you’re a teenager, you feel like an alien. Those ideas I really loved, and still love.
They do all these events at ATX (Television Festival), and they were doing a Friday Night Lights screening. They did a Parenthood panel. And then they were doing a Roswell panel. And in my mind, I was like, “The Parenthood and Friday Night Lights things are going to be the thing that people are really going to go to. And there will be like three people there for Roswell.” And the whole weekend I was there, people would come up to me and ask me about Roswell—some of them came all the way from Europe. That audience is so very passionate. It was cool to see those people out there. It was kind of great to see all those people from the cast, a lot of whom I hadn’t really seen much or at all for years, and to see them all grown-up. That was a really great part of it.
Friday Night Lights
Seasons: 5
Years: 2006-11
In my first meeting with Peter Berg, I had to tell him: I’m a baseball fan, I’m not a football fan. I’m Jewish, not Christian. I’m from New York City, I don’t come from a small town in Texas. I would say, on paper, I’m not the guy to do that show for those reasons. I felt like it wasn’t something I was interested in at first because I didn’t really know that much. I hadn’t read the book or even seen the movie at the time. But when I saw all the source material and all the potential for it, I thought this could be just the most amazing television show.
One of the things that was more important to me than anything else, is that they planned on shooting it in Texas. Being able to shoot there, the potential for it is so great because you can really get the feeling of being dropped into this small town that's obsessed with their high school football team. So I kind of got into it despite my background, not because of it. It was really just my passion for these characters and the world of it, and the idea of this small town that depended on their football team in that way.
One of the things that I’m really proud about with the show is the female characters, and how they develop into being such critical and important parts of the show—as important as the guys on the team. And following their stories, and I thought that all needed to be brought out if the show was going to be a successful series that would run over multiple seasons.
My first connection in the show was with Coach Taylor. What happened was when I got hired to write this show, before I had done anything, we went to upfronts, and suddenly I was meeting with executives at networks, and people in the press. And this was a beloved property. I hadn’t done anything on the show yet, but people were shaking my hand and looking at me like, “Are you going to be able to do this? Are you not going to fuck this up?” Literally, I had people pulling me aside and saying, “I have to know that you will really be able to do this.” And I was like, “Oh my god. How can you say this to me?” But I had this "Eureka!" moment: like, now I have a way in, because the same thing that was happening to me, was happening for this coach. Here he was being expected to bring home a state championship, and the first thing that happens is his star quarterback gets paralyzed. And there’s all that expectation on him. He doesn’t know how he’s going to do it. But he can’t tell anybody that he doesn’t know how he’s going to do it. It was great because that was how I found my way in on that show.
It’s always cool for me when I’m watching TV, and I’ll just hear references to Friday Night Lights years later. It wasn’t so fun when Mitt Romney used “Clear Eyes, Full Hearts,” but other than that, it’s always been really cool when you see it come up.
Parenthood
Seasons: 6
Years: 2010-15
Friday Night Lights and Parenthood, the two of them, even though they are different shows, overlap for me. I worked with a lot of the same writers, a lot of the same people, and the process was similar. There was a great trust and belief in what I was going to be able to bring to it. The thing about Parenthood, more than any other thing I’ve ever done—the material was so deeply personal to us. A lot of the stories came from the my life and the lives of the writers. And that really made that experience powerful.
It’s interesting because I’ve been doing a few things since then, and when I look back at the casts we were able to get, it’s ridiculous. It’s insane. I think it just wouldn’t be possible unless you were like Woody Allen putting together a TV show. It’s very difficult to get people to do a network show at all—let alone eight or ten people who could be single leads on their own show. Between Lauren Graham and Peter Krause, Craig T. Nelson and Bonnie Bedelia, Dax Shepard and Monica Potter—these are people who all could have been front and center. To have all these people sign on to be part of this large ensemble and to really embrace the ensemble nature of what this show was. That was amazing.