A Quote by Jason Katims

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 think television has become such an interesting place for characters and for incredible storytelling. Half of what I watch are television shows that I've become obsessed with. I just think that it's opened up so much, to be such an interesting and creative medium, and so many wonderful directors and actors are moving to television because it is a great medium for telling stories and for creating a character over a long period of time.
I like to multitask. I love the process of the storytelling in television. I love the serial. Even my stab at doing a procedural show was still very much serialized. I'm such a serialized storyteller. I feel like the story never ends. I want it to go and go and go. However, with cable and streaming now it's endless. You can do anything.
I don't think anything connects with an audience as deeply as a long-form serialized drama, and much as I love television, I've always found a good ongoing comics series to be much more immersive.
Once you buy into a television show, there doesn't have to be resolution from week to week. You can develop characters and storylines and react to the audience, so you get more of a serialized version of storytelling where you can go much deeper into each character. It's more like a novel.
I'm sure in less than 10 years there will be several streaming services or whatever you want to call them that are dedicated to retro television, like rare retro television, and maybe we'll end up doing something with that. Maybe Gigi will find popularity there, because it was fun, it was kitschy and very stupid and very dirty. But it had heart. I hope people will watch it one day.
In the second season, usually television shows are running with the characters; they really get them. And then, the third season, they can push characters and really explore secondary storylines and things like that. And so I tend to like third seasons of most shows.
I've always liked shape-shifter characters. I gravitated towards characters like Mystique from 'X-Men,' Zam Wesell from 'Star Wars,' and Tonks from 'Harry Potter.'
On any serialized show, you're going to have through-lines that take you through the season, and you're going to have individual arcs that resolve themselves in shorter order.
I think the amazing thing about 'Twin Peaks' was that it completely changed television from that point forward. It showed everyone that you can just sit really quiet with storylines and characters. It can be scary, it can be uncomfortable, it can be weirdly funny.
For me, as an audience member, I'm always most engaged by serialized storytelling, so as an actor, the thing that I take away from it is how much fun it is to perform a serialized story.
Earlier, we had shows like 'Hasratein' and 'Shanti,' which had great storylines and mature content. Now, with a hundred shows running five to seven days a week, the TV industry has become very torturous and taxing for the actors.
Sometimes on a soap, it can become about all this other stuff - the party circuit, reality shows - but I gravitated towards people who kept it all about the work.
I always loved comic books when I was growing up, and Spider-Man was definitely a character I gravitated towards because I loved the story of an average teenager having super powers.
You used to have to make a choice. Is it a serialized television show, or is it a stand-alone or procedural? We were wildly influenced by The X-Files. Even when we created Fringe, it was the same thing. It's the gold standard of all gold standards, in genre television, and it was so wonderful because you felt so much for those characters.
'Rocky' is a movie that just happens to be about boxing. It's really about characters and story lines and relationships and all those things, and the backdrop is boxing. You can go back and watch the final fight in 'Rocky' a thousand times. If you dig that movie, if you like the characters, you'll watch the whole movie over and over.
I've always gravitated towards those ultimate lines in songs, the line you grab on to. That line in 'Smells Like Teen Spirit,' 'Here we are now/Entertain us' - the irony, the antagonism; that's always stuck with me.
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