Jason Katims makes family and community dramas worth staying with because he gives people time to matter. We rate that patience highly, especially in Friday Night Lights, though his scripts sometimes explain what the actors have already shown.
Fi1m perspective
In Friday Night Lights (2006), Kyle Chandler’s patient authority gives the drama a reason to slow down and attend to people under pressure. We were moved by that performance because it makes the programme’s concern for its characters convincing. Katims is good at giving such performances space, even when the story could use a little more speed. We recommend his work most warmly when the actors are allowed to do some of the explaining.
My So-Called Life (1994), for which he wrote three episodes, helped establish his interest in teenagers and families. Ed Zwick was an early mentor. Katims went on to create Relativity (1996) and Roswell (1999), the latter mixing teenage drama with genre elements. His particular strength emerged in sustaining larger casts across long-running series, giving several people’s difficulties the attention usually reserved for a lead character.
The decisive work is Friday Night Lights, where he was head writer and executive producer, followed by Parenthood (2010), which he created and ran. His contribution is chiefly as a writer and producer: he directed two episodes of the former and three of the latter. He favours fluid, multi-camera shooting that leaves room for unplanned moments between actors. That approach suits the intersecting stories and gives the performances some freedom from the careful preparation of the scripts.
Our reservation about Friday Night Lights is that Katims and his fellow writers sometimes supply an explanation after the actors have made the point. Their concern with doing right by everyone can leave too little happening. The handheld images cannot disguise that loss of urgency. Anyone expecting a tightly driven sports story should know that its attention is often elsewhere, although the performances make the slower stretches worth forgiving.
Dear Edward (2023) reunited him with Friday Night Lights collaborator Connie Britton, another reason to consider his work through its performers rather than his directing credits. We would follow those performers when choosing among his programmes, since his writing benefits from actors who need little help making a feeling clear. Start with Friday Night Lights, and allow for the moments when a good actor has finished the job but the script has another paragraph.
Biography
Jason Katims is an American television writer, producer and playwright. Born on 30 November 1960 in Brooklyn, New York, he began as a playwright in New York before moving into television in the mid-1990s after being discovered by producer Ed Zwick. He wrote episodes of My So-Called Life (1994) and created the series Relativity (1996) and Roswell (1999–2002).
Katims served as head writer, executive producer and occasional director on Friday Night Lights (2006–2011). He won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series in 2011 for the series finale. He later created and executive produced Parenthood (2010–2015) and About a Boy (2014–2015), and has written feature films including The Pallbearer (1996) and The Vow (2012).
