Greg Berlanti

Greg Berlanti (born May 24, 1972, in Rye, New York) is an American screenwriter, producer and director for film and television. He is one of the most prolific figures in American television of the last twenty-five years, known for a run of teen drama, family drama and superhero series that reached wide audiences.

He grew up in Rye, in a family of Italian and Irish descent, and came out as gay at an early age. After studying playwriting at Northwestern University, he spent the mid-1990s working a string of temporary jobs in Los Angeles until Kevin Williamson, a friend from college, passed him the script for Dawson's Creek. He joined the show as a writer in its second season and rose quickly through the ranks, becoming showrunner in 2000. In that role he pushed for a gay character on a primetime series and for the first kiss between two men on American network television, arguing that a character who had come out could not reasonably be denied a kiss.

His career widened from there. He created Everwood, which ran from 2002 to 2006, and co-created Jack & Bobby. He then moved to Touchstone Television, where he produced Brothers & Sisters, which featured the first same-sex legal marriage on network television, and Dirty Sexy Money, which included a recurring transgender character. On film he directed The Broken Hearts Club: A Romantic Comedy, Life as We Know It and later Love, Simon, a teen romantic comedy centred on a gay protagonist. He co-wrote and co-produced the DC Comics film Green Lantern, which was neither a critical nor a financial success.

His largest footprint came with The CW's Arrowverse, built around Arrow and The Flash, and with Riverdale and You, which moved from Lifetime to Netflix. His company, Berlanti Productions, founded in 2000, has carried an unusually large slate of live-action series across networks and streamers, and in 2023 it signed a deal with Warner Bros. running to 2027. His legacy lies less in a signature authorial style than in a long record of building mainstream genre television and giving LGBTQ+ characters a regular place within it.