Lots of TV (and Gay Characters) from Rye Native Berlanti
(PHOTO: Rye native and TV superhero Greg Berlanti Credit: Genevieve on Flickr)
If you think there is too much television to watch, you can thank Rye native Greg Berlanti. Berlanti is a producer who is credited with 18 active shows on TV, breaking the record of ten shows held by Aaron Spelling and Jerry Bruckheimer. Deadline.com has the write-up below.
He is also responsible for a variety of gay "firsts" on TV – gay superhero, transgender recurring character, transgender superhero, legal gay marriage and lesbian superhero.
Wikipedia on Berlanti describing growing up: "He described his early life in an August 2004 interview with Entertainment Weekly: "We were Italians in a town of WASPs" and his family was not "doing as well as 90% of the community."
Deadline.com:
"With Record Number Of Shows On Air, Super-Producer Greg Berlanti Brings Needed Representation To The Small Screen — Deadline Disruptors
Nobody gets with the program like Greg Berlanti, the super-producer of television who currently has a record 18 active shows across the dial—the record before Berlanti broke it several times had been 10 shows (a mark reached by both Aaron Spelling and Jerry Bruckheimer), which makes the latest achievement by Berlanti Productions all the more impressive.
The genial 46-year-old native of Rye, New York, who got his start at age 26 when he landed a writing job for Dawson’s Creek in 1998, has established two hallmarks with his unprecedented episodic output: no one has shown a savvier touch when it comes to superhero franchises (he has seven, including Arrow, The Flash, and Supergirl on The CW) and no one has seized the cause of representation with more gusto.
Berlanti-produced shows have piled up a long list of firsts. The first gay superhero to headline a TV series (Freedom Fighters: The Ray), the first transgender recurring character on TV (on Dirty Sexy Money), the first transgender superhero on TV (on Supergirl), the first legal gay marriage on network TV (on Brothers & Sisters), and, ramping up for this fall, the first lesbian superhero to headline a television show (when Ruby Rose dons the mask for a Batwoman pilot for the CW).
Berlanti and his partner, former LA Galaxy soccer player Robbie Rogers, were honored last September with the Los Angeles LGBT Center’s Gala Vanguard Awards and, that same month, the most productive producer in television was also awarded a $300 million pact renewal that will keep him on Warner’s Burbank lot through 2024. Together the two milestones suggest that Berlanti is going up, up, but not away."
Read the rest.
