2011/10/05
by Chanel
Jason Katims is having a very busy month. His show, Parenthood (Tuesdays, 10pm/9c), which he is the executive-producer and showrunner of, started its third season on NBC on September 13th. Then five days later, in a surprising upset worthy of the Dillon Panthers, he took home the Emmy for Best Writing for a Drama Series for penning the series finale of NBC and DirectTV’s Friday Night Lights. Katims beat out the critics’ favorite for the Emmy – Mad Men’s Matthew Weiner, who nearly every pundit predicted was a shoo-in to win that award. Now, Parenthood is three episodes into its new year and is one of the few bright spots on the always-struggling NBC’s Fall schedule in the ratings category. In this exclusive interview for The Faster Times, Katims talks Season 3 and spills a few secrets on what’s to come…
The Faster Times: First off, I just wanted to say congratulations on your Emmy win!
Jason Katims: Thanks very much, thank you. I appreciate it.
TFT: On Parenthood, you have one of the hardest showrunning jobs in television in that, with its sprawling cast of Bravermans, you often have to juggle four to five storylines a week just to fit everyone in. What is it like for you and the writers writing for a show that has fifteen principle characters?
JK: Well, it’s both very exciting and on the other hand it’s a challenge. What’s great about it is we have such an incredibly strong cast that we are able to kind of write anything for them and you know they’re going to be able to deliver. In that case, you have a tremendous amount of freedom as you’re breaking stories and writing scripts. On the other hand, because it is such a large cast, there is that challenge to continue to service all the characters and, as you go through episode to episode, to try to figure out the mathematics of how to keep everybody involved. Sometimes I need to consciously create a storyline where you’re pairing different characters in a very deliberate way just to try to find ways to get everybody in the episode.
TFT: NBC recently reduced your Season 3 episode order from 22 episodes to 16. How far into the writing and production process of the season did that notice come in, and how does it now affect your plans for the season as a whole?
JK: They actually didn’t reduce our order from 22 to 16, they ordered 16 to begin with. I think somebody else heard it that way and I think because people assume that once a season gets picked up for a third season, then they assume that it’s going to be for 22 since we did 22 episodes in the past. I think this was part of one of the things that [NBC’s new president of programming] Bob Greenblatt is doing to try to reinvigorate the network. That is to, rather than have one show try to last the whole year from September through May, to have us come in and do 16 episodes and have them air as consecutively as humanly possible and then have another show come into that time slot for the later part of the year. I think that was the thinking behind that. So we weren’t actually reduced, all along we were breaking for stories for 16 episodes. ***
