Greg Berlanti
Greg Berlanti is a producer, born 1972.
Greg Berlanti writes and produces at a volume with no real modern equivalent. He founded Berlanti Productions in 2000 and has since had a hand in Dawson's Creek, Everwood, Brothers & Sisters, Political Animals, Riverdale, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina and You, alongside the DC television empire that ran on The CW for a decade: Arrow, The Flash, Supergirl, Legends of Tomorrow and Superman & Lois, plus Titans and Doom Patrol elsewhere. He holds the International Emmy Founders Award.
The house style is sincerity. Berlanti shows are earnest in a way that was thoroughly unfashionable for most of the period they aired. Characters say what they feel, out loud, at length, usually to a parent or a sibling, and the plot waits politely for them to finish. Arrow began as a grim vigilante drama and mutated into a family soap with archery; the shows that followed simply admitted this from the start. It made them enormously durable and, over years of annual crossovers, extremely silly.
His directing is rarer and better than the volume suggests. The Broken Hearts Club in 2000 is a low-budget ensemble about a group of gay friends in Los Angeles, made when studios were not making that film. Love, Simon in 2018 is the same instinct at studio scale: a mainstream teen romance with a gay lead, released wide, structured exactly like every straight version of itself, which was the entire argument. Fly Me to the Moon in 2024 is glossier and less personal. Taken together the three films say more about what he actually cares about than the whole television slate does.
Movies (5)
TV (15)
Where to start with Greg Berlanti
Everwood is the underrated one and the best argument for him as a writer. A small-town family drama about a widowed neurosurgeon and his son, it takes grief seriously across a full season and carries none of the superhero machinery that came later.
Love, Simon is the film to watch, and worth watching with its release in mind: a major studio teen romance built around a gay protagonist, made deliberately conventional so nobody could file it away as a niche picture.
For the DC run, Arrow is the origin and its first two seasons are genuinely good television before the universe swallowed it. The Flash is the warmest and the best fit for the house voice. Supergirl is the most uneven and the most ambitious. DC's Legends of Tomorrow is the strangest thing on the list, a series that abandoned coherence early and improved considerably for it.
You is the outlier: nasty, funny, and about as far from the earnest register as this catalogue goes.
The Arrowverse
Six interconnected DC shows running simultaneously, with annual crossovers that required all of them to coordinate scripts. It was the largest shared television universe anyone has attempted, and Arrow is where to start if you want to see how it was built.
The dramas he created
Before the superheroes he made unusually earnest character dramas. Everwood is the best of them by a distance and holds up far better than its network slot suggested. You is the outlier, and by some way the nastiest thing he has produced.
The films
Love, Simon was the first major-studio teen romance with a gay lead and it is deliberately conventional, which was the entire argument. The Broken Hearts Club is his debut, made twenty years earlier for almost nothing.