Jason Katims

“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.”

“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.”

“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 'Moonlighting' tension of the couple that obviously never can get together, there's an innate sort of fun and tension in that.”

“If nobody has really done a show about people in their twenties that has been successful, why?”

“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.”

“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.”

“My first job in television was on 'My So-Called Life.'”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“'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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The frustrating thing about 'Friday Night Lights' is I know a lot more people would respond to the show if they saw it.”

“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.”

“The environment in a writer's room, I've really come to feel, should be some form of democracy.”