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.
Jason Katims
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.
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.
There's something about the alchemy of the show - the actors, the writers, the directors, the editors - that makes 'Parenthood' unique. You get so deeply embedded with these characters because you go through life with them, and that's our priority.
The frustrating thing about 'Friday Night Lights' is I know a lot more people would respond to the show if they saw it.
What's great is that I keep hearing from people who are discovering 'Friday Night Lights' because of streaming and Netflix and Hulu and all of these things. Somehow... things don't get old as fast as they used to. They stay vibrant.
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.
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.'
The 'Moonlighting' tension of the couple that obviously never can get together, there's an innate sort of fun and tension in that.
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.
I did a lot of freelance desk publishing jobs when I graduated from college. I sort of earned a living doing that while I was writing plays, which was what I wanted to do. My hope was to become a playwright.
I sort of was inspired by 'Friday Night Lights,' where it was a very different show, but similar in that they were both large ensemble dramas where you had many stories going on at once. I wanted to do a show that shared that element, and that's really why I wanted to develop 'Parenthood' as a series.
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.
If nobody has really done a show about people in their twenties that has been successful, why?
I think there's definitely a way to tell a story, to also look at marriages that are working, but find drama from what's challenging them. That's what I think, certainly, 'Parenthood' is kind of about: the unexpected things that come up in your life that challenge you as a man, as a woman, as a husband and a wife, and as a parent.
My first job in television was on 'My So-Called Life.'
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.
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.
I feel like not only are 'Parenthood' fans passionate, but that passion has grown over the run of the show and people got more invested as the show has gone on. That really does help keep shows on the air.
The most frustrating thing to me is when I tell people I work on 'Friday Night Lights,' they'll say, 'Oh, I hear that's a really good show.' They never watched it.
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.
How do you do something where you're able to be specific and edgy enough to compete with what the cable networks are doing and, at the same time, appeal to a broader audience? That's the line that everyone in network television is trying to tread.
I came to NBC on 'Friday Night Lights' and they have supported that show and found ways - unprecedented ways - to keep it on the air for a long time. And when I came to them with the idea of doing 'Parenthood,' they not only supported me in doing it but also got behind it in such a way that we were able to put together this incredible cast.
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.
The environment in a writer's room, I've really come to feel, should be some form of democracy.
Any show I'm working on, I want the stories to always be about something, and to have the potential to be emotional. That's the kind of story that I like.
The stories in 'Parenthood' are so much the stories of our lives. And the people who have worked on the show feel very connected to these characters.
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.
What's fun about comedy is you're pushing things a little further than you would in a drama; you're pushing reality a little bit more.
People think about autism as something with kids. Well, those kids grow up.
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.
Honestly, I don't know enough about what's a good timeslot and what isn't. Either you have a timeslot where nobody is really tuning in, which isn't good, or you're in a good hour, and then you've got a lot of competition.
'Parenthood' has been the beneficiary of wonderful performances by child actors.
As much as I thought the end of 'Friday Night Lights' was a really great ending, I was one of those people who wanted to make it into a movie. Even though it ultimately didn't work to do that movie, I did work with some of the other writers and by myself writing a script for that.
'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.
It's so funny because a lot of times we'll have these discussions as writers, and you feel like you're having a discussion with your wife: 'I don't know. Are they ready to have another baby? Is it time? Well, she's not getting any younger.'
I think that the one thing about 'Parenthood' is that, while it's never been a huge out-of-the-box hit, it's always been solid. We've always kept our audience.
