With six network TV shows and a feature film under his belt in just nine years, executive producer and writer Greg Berlanti has a refreshingly uncomplicated view of Hollywood. “I never worried about approaching a studio or thought twice about trying to get a particular actor or thought about how I could change my scripts to suit anyone,” he says. “You finish a script; you hand it to people and just see what comes next. If you write something that’s of its time and has the right voice and it’s good enough, it finds a life.”

Berlanti’s impressions of himself and show business are emblematic of a new era for gay power brokers in Hollywood. Gone are the days of middle-aged, ball-breaking closet case executives or embattled and embittered guerrilla-style outsiders. If Berlanti’s prime offices at Disney-ABC -- on the same floor where Walt Disney once had his office -- are any indication, his footing in mainstream media couldn’t be more solid.

From the unconventional springboard of a hit gay movie, 2000’s The Broken Hearts Club, which he wrote and directed at the age of 26, Berlanti’s ascent has been rapid. The following year he became executive producer of teen drama sensation Dawson’s Creek and signed a multimillion-dollar three-year contract with the WB under which he created Everwood and Jack & Bobby. After signing another multimillion-dollar deal with ABC in 2006, the 35-year-old is now the mastermind of three of the most talked-about dramas on television: Brothers & Sisters, Dirty Sexy Money, and Eli Stone.

He has always played by his own rules because he never thought he’d have to do anything else. As writers, directors, actors, and armchair critics bemoaned the lack of gay content in mainstream media, Berlanti was unfettered, never asking permission to do things that many of his less ballsy and ultimately less successful contemporaries dared to. As a result, he’s set himself apart as an understated maverick, creating the most unusual mass-appeal programming on television. Last summer, around the same time The Hollywood Reporter was pressured to tone down an obituary noting that TV legend Merv Griffin was gay, Berlanti’s Brothers & Sisters picked up three Emmy nominations, and he was readying two more shows for premiere, including his latest project, Dirty Sexy Money, which enjoyed a larger promotion budget than any show on ABC.

Gay careers and story lines now thrive on TV more than any other medium. Five of the top 10 Nielsen-ranked shows in a recent period had recurring gay characters or hosts. And openly gay network presidents include Showtime’s Bob Greenblatt, the Disney Channel’s Rich Ross, and MTV Networks’ Brian Graden.

Though well-deserved plaudits often go to executive producers and writers like The L Word’s Ilene Chaiken and Six Feet Under’s Alan Ball for breaking queer-content boundaries on premium-cable TV, Berlanti was there first -- and on broadcast television to boot.

Berlanti wrote The Broken Hearts Club after several ill-fated attempts at a mainstream blockbuster: “I kept trying to write a multimillion-dollar movie. I would get 15 pages in and would feel like a fraud. I’d always loved Diner, and I really wanted to write something about what I’d just been through -- coming out and moving to L.A. I just wanted to write a character-driven script that assistants in this town would talk about, and maybe get another job doing something else.”

The script for Broken Hearts did just that. A college friend showed it to Scream creator Kevin Williamson, whose Dawson’s Creek series was about to debut. He quickly hired Berlanti as a writer for the second season, in which the two introduced the groundbreaking gay character Jack McPhee.

On the high school soap that aired on the WB from 1998 to 2003 and costarred a pre–Tom Cruise–controlled Katie Holmes, Kerr Smith’s Jack wasn’t merely the gay character who showed up intermittently. Viewers followed Jack as he came out to his tight-knit group of friends and then his domineering father, tried Internet dating, and had his first kiss and first boyfriend -- then eventually saw him go off to college, pledge a fraternity, and come out all over again.

“By the time I’d shown the Broken Hearts script to Kevin, I’d had all these meetings with people who would go, ‘I loved your script, but could it be all women?’ or ‘Can it be about a bunch of straight guys and one of them is gay?’ I decided I’d rather it just be what it was, and if it ever got made, it got made, and if it didn’t, it didn’t. It was the first script that got me work, so I was sort of too grateful to it to fuck with it.”

During his first season on Dawson’s he was in the elevator with Williamson when Mickey Liddell, who had just finishing producing the 1999 film Go, got in, and the two were introduced. “He told me he’d read my script, that he loved it, so I said, ‘Why don’t you make it then?’” Berlanti says. “He said, ‘Maybe I will,’ and a couple months later we were having dinner, and he was trying to convince me to direct it. I told him no, and he told me he’d ask me again, and he did.” It took two more tries to convince Berlanti to do it. The Broken Hearts Club was the first movie with all gay characters produced by a major studio in 30 years—since 1970’s The Boys in the Band.

As Broken Hearts premiered at Sundance, Berlanti’s television career was simultaneously taking off, and it reads like a string of even more firsts: broadcast TV’s first passionate gay kissing scene, for Jack on Dawson’s Creek (with that series Berlanti had become, at 27, the youngest show-runner in network history), the first recurring transgender character played by a transgender performer (Carmelita, played by Candis Cayne, on Dirty Sexy Money), and one of the few same-sex commitment ceremonies ever shown on a TV drama, for Kevin Walker (Matthew Rhys) on this month’s season finale of Brothers & Sisters.

But Berlanti doesn’t necessarily consider himself a crusader. “It’s hard for me to delineate the lines between gay and straight in my life, apart from the fact that I’m in a 2 1/2 year relationship and I’m in love with a man,” he says. “I’m just as proud of episodes I’ve done that have dealt with abortion, medicinal marijuana, and religion and spirituality.”

The writers room is where Berlanti is most comfortable -- “Actors make me nervous in general; it’s really hard to make all of them happy all the time” -- and it’s also where he’s most aware of the impact his sexuality has on his work. “We’re doing character-driven shows, so it’s all about the transformation of these people, and most of the pivotal moments for me personally are around my sexuality and coming-out. So when we deal with a character’s isolation or loneliness or rebirth, all of those are places in my life that I’ve confronted as a gay man -- I run things back through that lens myself.”

Crusader or not, Berlanti happily admits to taking pleasure and pride in getting gay issues onto networks and leveraging his success to push the envelope. “It’s definitely been great to have been part of the advancement of gay content on TV. I remember how difficult it was to get Jack’s first kiss on the air. Kevin and I wrote his coming-out episodes together the season before, and that was hard,” he remembers. He left in the middle of that season to direct Broken Hearts, and when he returned, the network asked him to take over the reins of Dawson’s entirely. At the time the show was struggling in the ratings. “When I said yes to taking over the show, my one request was that they let me do a gay kiss. They told me that if I came back and improved the ratings, I could get my kiss.” That season he introduced the Joey-Pacey-Dawson love triangle, ratings soared, and Berlanti got his kiss. “Even though I’ve been able to do some stuff that’s slightly edgy in some ways, those are always gifts you have to get from the network. It’s still a struggle.”

After nine years, though, he does see progress, even if he’s reluctant to take any well-deserved credit for it: “It’s always great when you call executives to tell them that you want to do something like Kevin’s commitment ceremony on Brothers & Sisters. I still kind of pause because of my old history with this stuff, and I wait for an ‘Oh, well, I’m not sure…’ but it doesn’t really happen to me anymore,” he says. “And I give ABC more credit than I give me. At other networks it’s really cool to do the gay joke or joke character. I watch it show up in reality shows and other things, and there’s still a meanness about it that I don’t care for.”


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