Catherine Reitman: The Woman Who Made Motherhood Look Exactly Like This

There is a particular kind of creative ambition that does not wait for permission — that looks at a gap in the culture, recognises that the gap is personal, and fills it. Catherine Reitman is that kind of creator. The daughter of one of Hollywood’s most celebrated directors and a French-Canadian actress, she grew up surrounded by the mechanics of the entertainment industry without ever assuming that the door was simply open for her. She auditioned, hustled, took small roles in big shows, and spent years building the kind of professional credibility that eventually gave her the platform to make the thing she actually wanted to make. What she wanted to make was Workin’ Moms — and the result was seven seasons of television that said something honest and funny and uncomfortable about what it actually means to be a working mother in the modern world.

Personal Details

Growing Up Reitman: Hollywood Heritage Without the Easy Path

Catherine Reitman was born on April 28, 1981, in Los Angeles, California, the middle child of Ivan Reitman and Geneviève Robert. Her father’s story is one of the more extraordinary in Hollywood history: born in Komárno, Czechoslovakia, in 1946, he survived the Holocaust as an infant — his parents were sent to concentration camps, and Ivan was hidden by neighbours — before the family eventually emigrated to Canada. He built a film career that produced some of the most commercially successful comedies of the 1980s and 1990s, including Ghostbusters, Kindergarten Cop, and Junior, and became one of the most recognisable names in Hollywood production.

Her mother Geneviève Robert is a French-Canadian actress who married Ivan in 1976 and appeared in the 1983 science fiction film Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone. Her older brother Jason Reitman, born in Montreal in 1977, became a critically acclaimed film director in his own right — earning three Academy Award nominations for films including Juno, Up in the Air, and Tully, and later directing Ghostbusters: Afterlife, the sequel that honoured their father’s legacy. Her younger sister Caroline is also an actress, married to actor Michele Lee.

Growing up in such a household meant that the entertainment industry was the backdrop of daily life rather than an aspiration from the outside. But it also meant that the standard was high and the comparison point was formidable. Catherine attended the Cate School in Carpinteria, California — a prestigious boarding school — before studying acting at the University of Southern California. Her training was formal and serious, and it gave her the technical foundation that would eventually support not just her performance work but her writing and directing as well.

Early Career: Supporting Roles and Building Credibility

Catherine Reitman’s path to creating her own show was built on years of supporting work in American television — the kind of career that requires both genuine skill and the patience to understand that visible opportunity takes time to arrive.

She appeared in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, How I Met Your Mother, Weeds, Hollywood Residential, and Black-ish — a range of comedy credits that demonstrated her ability to land in an established show’s comedic register without disrupting it. She had roles in films including Knocked Up (2007), I Love You, Man (2009), and Friends with Benefits (2011) — Judd Apatow-adjacent work that placed her in the comedic world she was building toward on her own terms.

In January 2011 she launched Breakin’ It Down with Catherine Reitman on YouTube — a movie review web series that ran until July 2013 and demonstrated an early instinct for building an audience through direct digital engagement. She guest co-hosted Hollywood Babble-On, the podcast hosted by Kevin Smith and Ralph Garman, and appeared in The Real Wedding Crashers — a television series inspired by the 2005 film Wedding Crashers. She was also part of the American Dad! voice cast and appeared in Comedy Bang! Bang!

The cumulative effect of this work was a performer who understood comedy from the inside — who had watched how shows were run, how writers’ rooms operated, and what made a scene land — and who was assembling the knowledge she would need to run her own production.

Workin’ Moms: The Show She Had to Make

In 2016, Catherine Reitman and her husband Philip Sternberg co-founded Wolf & Rabbit Entertainment ULC and pitched a half-hour single-camera comedy to CBC — Canada’s national public broadcaster. The concept was drawn directly from Reitman’s own life: a group of friends navigating the specific chaos of returning to work after maternity leave, managing careers and children and relationships and the particular guilt that the modern working mother is trained to feel as a constant background hum.

Workin’ Moms premiered on CBC Television on January 10, 2017. Reitman played Kate Foster, a PR executive and mother of two — a character autobiographical enough to be honest and fictionalised enough to be dramatic. Philip Sternberg played Nathan Foster, Kate’s husband, making their on-screen marriage a direct extension of their professional partnership. The show also starred Jessalyn Wanlim, Dani Kind, Enuka Okuma, and Juno Rinaldi as the core group of mothers navigating careers, relationships, and the specific institutional failures that make modern parenting so relentlessly demanding.

The show’s tone was its most distinctive quality — neither the warm sentimentality of conventional family television nor the detached irony of prestige comedy, but something more direct and more uncomfortable. Reitman wrote mothers who were sometimes selfish, sometimes wrong, sometimes genuinely struggling and refusing to pretend otherwise. The honesty was the point. She was making the show she wanted to watch and had not been able to find.

In February 2019, in the middle of season three, Workin’ Moms premiered globally on Netflix — expanding the show’s audience from Canadian to international overnight. The response confirmed what the CBC numbers had already suggested: the show’s specific honesty about the working mother experience was not a niche concern but a universal one that had simply not been given adequate screen time.

Workin’ Moms at a Glance

The show ran for seven seasons before Reitman announced in June 2022 that the seventh would be its last. The decision was hers — a creator choosing the end of her own story rather than letting the network or the audience’s appetite make that choice for her. The final season premiered on January 3, 2023, on CBC and subsequently on Netflix.

Ivan Reitman: The Father She Lost

On February 12, 2022 — while Workin’ Moms was in the final stages of production on its seventh and last season — Ivan Reitman died at his home in Montecito, California, at the age of seventy-five. His death came suddenly and peacefully in his sleep, and it arrived at a moment when Catherine was both professionally at the height of her powers and personally navigating the particular grief of losing a parent whose legacy in the industry she had grown up within.

Ivan Reitman had remained a creative presence throughout his children’s careers. He was, by all accounts, generous with both his professional knowledge and his personal support. Jason Reitman has spoken about directing Ghostbusters: Afterlife as a tribute to his father, a passing of the franchise from one generation to the next. Catherine’s relationship with her father informed Workin’ Moms in ways both direct and indirect — the show’s central concern with the relationship between professional ambition and family love is not unrelated to having grown up in a household where those two things were always in conversation.

Dan Aykroyd, his longtime collaborator, appeared as Kate’s father in Workin’ Moms — a guest role that brought the Ghostbusters world into Catherine’s show and that served as a small, warm acknowledgment of the professional family her father had built around himself.

Philip Sternberg: Partner On and Off Screen

Philip Sternberg and Catherine Reitman married in August 2009. He was working as president of Candor Entertainment before they co-founded Wolf & Rabbit Entertainment together in 2016 — a professional partnership that produced the show they built together and that has continued as the primary vehicle for their creative work.

On Workin’ Moms, Sternberg played Nathan Foster — Kate’s husband — making the on-screen couple a direct mirror of the real one. He directed numerous episodes across the series’ second and third seasons and received an International Emmy Award nomination for his producing work on the show. They have two sons: Jackson, born in 2013, and Liam, born in 2016 — both of whom were born during the period when Reitman was developing the show that would draw directly on the experience of being their mother.

Awards and Recognition

Legacy: The Creator Who Told the Truth

Catherine Reitman built something that the entertainment industry had not quite built before — a show about working mothers that neither idealised nor condescended to its subject, that was funny because it was honest rather than despite it, and that found a global audience because the specific experience it depicted was not specific at all.

She did it as the daughter of a famous director, which means she understood the industry. She did it as a working mother of two sons, which means she understood the material. She did it alongside her husband, which means she understood collaboration. And she did it at a moment when streaming had created the conditions for a Canadian comedy about maternity leave to find an audience in countries that would never have encountered it through conventional broadcast.

The show is finished. The next chapter of her career has not yet been announced. But the creative template she established — make the thing that is missing, make it honest, make it yours — is the most durable legacy a creator can leave.

Career Timeline

Amelia Wright