Oh Its on Again Tell Me Where Were Partying I Hear That Its on Again Friday Night Lights

Few Television receiver heavyweights have washed every bit much to tell thoughtful, moving stories about teenagers as Jason Katims. While he was a young playwright, Katims bankrupt into the television industry as a staff writer for My So-Called Life — ground zero for realistic depictions of adolescence on TV — then chop-chop went on to work on any number of seminal teen shows, culminating in his 5-season stint as the showrunner of the gorgeous pocket-size-town drama Friday Nighttime Lights , following high-school football players in a Texas boondocks.

Katims has, of form, written near nonteenagers too. For six seasons, his Parenthood told thoughtful stories about people struggling with very mundane, very real problems. (It was great.) But he'due south gone back to high schoolhouse with his latest serial Rise , an NBC drama that follows teenagers involved with a drama program in a dying Pennsylvania steel town.

Indeed, in many ways, Rising is "Friday Night Lights but with high school theater." Some of that is considering of how thoroughly the earlier serial became a role of TV history, but just as much is the extent to which information technology redefined Katims's career as peradventure Television set's foremost chronicler of ordinary lives as they're really lived, instead of incredibly high-stakes, more daring ones.

So when he joined me for the latest episode of my podcast, I Call up You're Interesting, I wanted to go Katims'due south accept on how the show had affected his career, starting with his thoughts on its most famous catchphrase, one that has entered the culture split from the show that spawned it.

An extract of our chat, lightly edited for length and clarity, follows.

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Emily VanDerWerff

"Clear eyes, full hearts, can't lose" has become this TV touchstone. When did you know that that was a thing?

Jason Katims

I'm non sure that really I knew during the course of the fourth dimension that we were doing the show that information technology was going to continue on and people would utilise information technology in that way. Information technology was something Pete Berg wrote in the airplane pilot episode. It wasn't my phrase that I started with.

Emily VanDerWerff

Correct, but you kept coming back to it.

Jason Katims

Oh, we kept coming dorsum to it! [Laughs.] Absolutely. I of the things that we had to learn with that was to be judicious with coming dorsum to it. You had to discover those moments that were big and non apply it in every episode and use information technology all of the time. That makes information technology iconic in a way. Look, it's the words. Information technology'south Kyle Chandler saying those words. Information technology's the faces of those players repeating them back to him. It'south a combination of all of those things.

It'due south cool, every once in a while, to hear it being quoted or used. Usually, it'south cool. A couple of people have adopted it that it wasn't that exciting. But it's really cool to see it alive on.

Jason Katims accepts the Emmy for writing in a drama series for his work on Friday Night Lights.

Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images

Emily VanDerWerff

That show was under the radar for so long, and now information technology feels like everybody I know has seen it. Have you had that feel? Do you experience like it's had the longest afterlife of anything you've worked on?

Jason Katims

It was interesting because when the prove started, they had these beautiful promos, with these beautiful, epic football game promos that they did. They were admittedly cute, and I think they encouraged people not to sentinel the show because then many people were, like, "I'm non a football fan."

I had this experience when we start started doing the show. I was a chaperone on a center-school trip. I recall it was me and a bunch of moms, and the moms were asking me what I was working on. I told them nigh the show, and I saw their eyes glaze over with colorlessness, and I said, "No, no, no. You don't have to similar football game to similar this bear witness. You would dear the show." And I saw them sort of smiling at me with empathy, feeling lamentable for me, this poor author trying to sell this show that they have no interest in.

To me, the thing about Friday Night Lights was you didn't have to like football to care about the show. Y'all didn't have to have any kind of knowledge of football or Texas or any of those things. It was so much just virtually these people and their lives, and it was so deeply felt. And I think that message started to come out over fourth dimension.

To this mean solar day — how many years later is it? — people are coming up to me and saying, "I merely watched it." And at present people are showing it to their kids. It'due south really cool. A few years ago, somebody told me, one of my friend'southward kids who was in higher said it'due south what everybody was watching, at least that yr in higher.

That's the great thing almost TV right now. My daughter watches shows from twenty years ago, 30 years ago. It doesn't matter to her. It doesn't take to be current. That's the keen thing. Television in a way at present lives on longer than it ever used to.

Emily VanDerWerff

Friday Night Lights has 1 of the dandy series finales. I'm normally someone who likes less closure in a finale, but that finale is all closure, and I love it. Tell me about the process of crafting that episode in detail, because that must take been a tough ane.

Jason Katims

The affair that was cool about that is that often when you lot end a show, you don't know you're going to terminate the prove, or if you do know you're going to end the evidence, y'all might know very late in the process. When the writers started the writers' room of that flavor, nosotros knew that we were driving toward an catastrophe.

To me, it was all almost set-upward. Information technology was all near everything that came before [the finale], and that was really the charm of that story is that final season of the prove was and then clearly all leading to that. By the time we get to that episode, it was sort of inevitable.

I really did want to exercise an episode that had closure. I wanted there to be an ending to the testify. I didn't desire information technology to be ambiguous. I felt like we had such a passionate audition. Information technology might have been a small audience, only information technology was so deeply passionate, and so I felt similar we owed that great catastrophe, but also an ending that was really, truly an catastrophe, where you got to see non only where everybody got to but had a little window into where they were going.

Emily VanDerWerff

Were there characters who were particularly hard to wrap up?

Jason Katims

The matter that was tricky about the catastrophe of the show was a lot of the characters that had kind of, sort of left the show earlier in the series, who we were going to try to come back to and bring dorsum at the end. That got a trivial bit catchy, how many people we would come back to, and we didn't have a lot of time to discover them.

I remember thinking about that a lot. At one point, we were going to attempt to be much more ambitious and attempt to bring everybody dorsum. At a certain signal, we let go of that and said nosotros're simply going to exercise what feels right for the episode.

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For more discussion with Katims, including the lessons he learned from My So-Called Life, his thoughts on if a prove like MSCL could become on the air today, and his responses to some of the controversies surrounding Ascension, listen to the full episode.

To hear more interviews with fascinating people from the world of arts and culture — from powerful showrunners to web series creators to documentary filmmakers — bank check out the I Think You're Interesting archives .

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Source: https://www.vox.com/2018/3/29/17174194/friday-night-lights-clear-eyes-full-hearts-jason-katims

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