Jason Katims is best known for making grown men cry.

Lunching at a trendy spot in Brentwood, California, Katims laughs at this. "It's not like I'm sitting up in bed in the morning thinking, I'm gonna make somebody cry," he says, his longish graying hair grazing the top of his collar, his accent still carrying a trace of his lefty Jewish Brooklyn roots. Despite his two decades as a successful writer and executive producer of a string of emotionally fraught and critically acclaimed TV series—including My So-Called Life, Friday Night Lights, Parenthood, and Roswell—the fifty-five-year-old Katims has the unassuming air of a guy who survived many lean years of workshops and showcases, as well as a day job slinging copy for a graphic designer.

"What I do as a storyteller, and what we do in the writers' room, is try not to divorce ourselves," he says. "We begin with events from our own lives. In Parenthood, for instance, there's the story about a kid with Asperger's, which I experienced with my son. And there's also the story when Monica Potter gets breast cancer—I went through that with my wife. What we try to do as writers is not to let ourselves think about the characters as characters only. We try to think of them as people like ourselves. As an actor, when you get a role, you have to find yourself in that role. We try to do that as storytellers."

Reflecting his origins in the theater—he likes to populate his writers' rooms with other theater veterans—Katims's shows have typically featured large ensemble casts and rich character development, helping launch what became TV's new era of complicated storytelling and dramatic honesty, though sometimes at the expense of ratings. Even as they soared to acclaim, Friday Night Lights (in the pilot, the star quarterback is paralyzed) and Parenthood (in the pilot, one father learns that his son is on the autism spectrum) initially fought to find an audience. Likewise, Katims's teen-alien series, Roswell, had a small but vocal following that helped keep the show on the air for three seasons.

Now, with The Path, Katims takes a different route to the underbelly of human relations. This beguiling new drama from the streaming network Hulu is set inside a fictional cult community. Intense, original, and refreshingly strange, it's Parenthood meets Wayward Pines meets Going Clear.

The ten-episode series debuts on March 30, with a new one-hour episode each week. An important piece in Hulu's bid to compete with Netflix and Amazon in the business of creating high-end series television exclusively for online viewing, the show stars Aaron Paul (Breaking Bad), Michelle Monaghan, and Hugh Dancy—along with Kathleen Turner in a guest role as the castrating mother of the cult's struggling leader (Dancy).

While many of his Hollywood contemporaries grew up as devotees of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, long on action and effects and short on plot, Katims represents a rapidly growing contingent of movie and TV writers who come from a theater background. The Path was created for Katims's True Jack Productions by his protégée, Jessica Goldberg, a Juilliard-trained playwright who got her Hollywood start on Parenthood.

Following the example of Friday Night Lights, which masqueraded as a show about football while placing its emotional focus on the relationship between the coach and his wife, The Path gives viewers a look at the curious anthropology of life inside a cult while rooting itself in the marriage of Monaghan's and Paul's characters.

In keeping with Katims's philosophy, the germ of the show was deeply personal to Goldberg. "Within a year, I lost my father and I had a horrible divorce," she says by telephone. "I was at the farmers market with my kid, and suddenly I just sort of had this moment. I remembered from freshman philosophy class the allegory of Plato's cave": A group of people live chained inside a cave, and the only things they can see are the shadows projected on the wall from objects passing in front of a fire behind them.

"I realized I felt like those prisoners," Goldberg says. "I was living in a cave. I thought to myself, It's all shadows; my life is completely shadows. I wanted to write about what it felt like to suddenly wake up one day and realize, Oh my God, the framework that has kept my life together all these years has just fallen apart."

"It's got the cult stuff that makes you want to lean in," says Katims. "But the reason why I'm really watching the show, what I am so riveted by in the story, is all about the typical things of life. There's a marriage, and raising kids within this community, and what happens when one of these kids starts to fall in love and break the rules. And there's the story of what happens when you are married to somebody and you lose faith, not in your marriage but in your whole worldview that you share with your wife and family. I see it as a very deeply personal show."

The youngest of three children, Katims was born three years after the Dodgers left Brooklyn and spent his early childhood in the Ebbets Field Apartments—the high-rise housing complex erected at the site of the team's old ballpark in Crown Heights. Later, as the neighborhood deteriorated, the family moved to a middle-class section of Brooklyn called Midwood.

His parents were "very politically active, very left-leaning. They would put a speaker on the top of the car and drive around the neighborhood on Election Day," Katims says. For many years, his father, who changed his name from Kotimsky, was a law-book salesman.

It was at Queens College, in "a basic English comp" class, that Katims found his calling. When it was his turn to read a required journal entry, he read a piece about picking up his high school girlfriend (and future wife) from her waitressing job. After class, the teacher approached him. "She said, 'Do you realize what that is?' And I was like, 'No.' And she said, 'That's a short story.' "

In his final semester, a playwriting class clicked. "I realized that all the writing I did was very much dialogue-driven, basically people's voices. It was just natural for me [to write plays]."

After graduation, Katims was determined to become a playwright. "I was kind of too young and stupid to know what a bad idea it was," he says. To make ends meet, he edited journals and newsletters for a graphic designer. For a time, he and his wife lived in a fifth-floor walk-up in a tenement building on the West Side of Manhattan. "We were pretty hand-to-mouth. I was making deals with the phone company to keep them from canceling our service."

While Katims was struggling to get plays produced, his dad was struggling to become an actor. At age fifty-five, he quit his sales job to pursue his original dream. "It was kind of interesting, because his second career mirrored my career," Katims says. Robert Katims, who died in 2010, eventually found modest success, landing small parts on television shows and in movies, including Mulholland Dr. and The Pallbearer, starring David Schwimmer and Gwyneth Paltrow, which was written and produced by his son. His most memorable role was in 1987's Broadcast News. After his character is fired as part of the news company's layoffs, the boss takes him aside and asks if there is anything he can do. "Well, I certainly hope you'll die soon," Robert says.

It would be a few more years before the son would get his own moment. One day in 1993, when he was thirty-three and well into his quest, Katims recalls, "I got a message on my machine from Ed Zwick's office." Along with his partner, Marshall Herskovitz, Zwick ran a well-known movie and TV production company.

"I called him back and he got on the phone," Katims remembers. "And he said, 'I read one of your plays and I liked it.' "

Katims's one-act play, published in a collection of short plays by the Actors Theatre of Louisville, was called The Man Who Couldn't Dance. In it, a guy goes to visit his old girlfriend after she gets married and has a child; the tone of the piece is very much a preview of his later work.

After Katims thanked Zwick for the compliment, there was an awkward pause in the conversation.

Finally, Zwick asked, "Do you know who I am?"

"No, I'm sorry. I don't," Katims confessed.

"I directed Glory, I created thirty-something …"

"Okay," Katims said. "I think you can stop there."

Katims eventually joined Zwick and Herskovitz's writing staff for My So-Called Life, a teen drama starring Claire Danes that ran on ABC for just one season but endures as a beloved classic. From there, he created Relativity for Zwick and Herskovitz, a drama about a young couple and their relatives in L. A. But it was Friday Night Lights, which debuted in 2006, that turned him into a Hollywood power.

That is another reason The Path is noteworthy. The show not only delves into original subject matter with a darker tone for Katims but marks another example of a star producer and showrunner throwing in with the cord cutters. (This summer, the Emmy-winning Katims will also bring a new series to HBO, a romantic drama called Us.)

Owned by Disney, 21st Century Fox, and NBC Universal, Hulu has moved aggressively into producing original programs, including The Mindy Project, picked up after Fox canceled the show; Amy Poehler's Difficult People, which will be returning for a second season; and Casual, a Jason Reitman comedy that was also renewed. February's J. J. Abrams–Stephen King miniseries, 11.22.63, starring James Franco as a teacher who goes back in time to stop the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, was considered Hulu's first big coup. The Path continues that streak.

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Katims, who has always worked in a broadcast-network setting, says producing for Hulu is "like working with a different animal." Instead of making a pilot and trying to sell a traditional twenty-two-episode series, Hulu bought ten episodes outright, a "straight-to-series" order.

The shorter shooting schedule is attractive to many stars, widening the potential talent pool. "Ten episodes is about three and a half months. That's about as long as it would take to do a movie. The actors can make that commitment and then be free to do features or be with their kids or whatever they want to be doing. So you're just able to put together an unbelievable cast," he says.

Most important, he says, is the liberation from ratings expectations and network pressures.

"Hulu's approach changes your entire perspective, because going in, it's not a question about whether they're going to pick it up. You're focusing on what you should be focusing on, which is: How do we tell the best first story and do it in such a way that's going to be compelling and make people want to come along for the ride? Rather than having to front-load everything and speed everything up, the people at Hulu are like, 'Hey, slow this down, because we really want to spend time with these characters.' "

The Path is not likely to elicit many tears, but it's complex, rich, and moving. Like other Katims series, it finds the soft place inside and gives it a tweak. But this time, Katims's audience will find him in a very different place.

Mike Sager Mike Sager is a bestselling author and award-winning reporter who's been a contributor to Esquire for thirty years.

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