[Flashback] TV Producer of the Year Greg Berlanti: "I Still Fight About Everything"

The Hollywood Reporter ^ | May 12, 2016 | Lacey Rose

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As prolific as Shonda, Ryan and Chuck, the lower-profile showrunner behind today's network hits ('Blindspot') and hunky superheroes ('The Flash,' 'Arrow') is not too big to keep pushing Hollywood's comfort zone on sexuality, abortions and so-called taboos. Greg Berlanti settles into a bank of couches in his office on the Warner Bros. lot, tucked in between brightly colored pillows with hand-stitched logos for two of his shorter-lived television series, No Ordinary Family and Dirty Sexy Money.

There are eight more pillows throughout the spacious office, one commemorating each of his film or television projects. His mother has them made for her now-43-year-old son, who welcomed a son of his own via surrogacy in February. "A lot of times, the pillow turns out better than the show," says Berlanti as he surveys the room, which is cluttered with superhero mementos and an excess of baby gear.

The New York native, who studied theater at Northwestern University, got an early education in TV showrunning when he was tapped to take over The WB's cultish teen drama Dawson's Creek at the tender age of 28. In way over his head, Berlanti recalls having standing calls on Sundays with his businessman father, who'd walk him through such things as how to hire or fire and how to manage a budget. "It was a steep, steep learning curve," he says with a chuckle.

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This creep is pretty much a major player in why we're getting an influx and overrepresentation of homosexuals in entertainment (which oftentimes involved outright changing a character's sexuality when they were either previously implied to be or confirmed outright to be straight) right now in America, and has been doing this kind of crap since Dawson's Creek. We really need to find a way to undo the damage he's done. Heck, he's also been doing race swapping as well to make it more "contemporary", despite it being completely pointless. What? Should we make MLK white just to make him more contemporary? Or make Patton Japanese?

Like I said, we really need to undo the damage he inflicted, being directly responsible for the Jack-Ethan kiss on Dawson's Creek, not to mention changing and forcing in too many homosexual characters to make himself feel better about being the odd one out, and may have been indirectly responsible for stuff like, say, Tim Kring's pointlessly changing Claire Bennet's sexual orientation in the final season of Heroes.

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LGBTQ represents 3.8% of the population, but over 90% of the entertainment industry. Biology has determined the best way to fertilize an egg. It has nothing to do with a man’s rectum.