Greg Berlanti on ‘Supergirl’: ‘People Want a Female Superhero’
Debuting October 26th on CBS, Supergirl is the first bona fide female superhero show to hit primetime TV since Wonder Woman went off the air in 1979. (No, Buffy doesn’t quite count) So showrunner Greg Berlanti felt a considerable responsibility to make it fly. It helps, of course, that Melissa Benoist, formerly of Glee, is an effervescent, unexpectedly amusing presence as Superman‘s cousin, Kara Zor-El – think Annie Hall in a cape.
Berlanti mastered teen-friendly humanistic drama as a writer for Dawson’s Creek (where both Chris Pratt and Emily VanCamp got their starts) and the creator of Everwood, and later became DC Comics’ go-to TV guy with the CW hits Arrow and The Flash – the latter show’s bright, anti-Man of Steel tone in particular seems to be a model for Supergirl. Berlanti took a break from his various writers’ rooms long enough to explain how this new show came together.
How did your connection with DC Comics begin?
Green Lantern: I pitched them a bunch of stories, [for] a series of films for Green Lantern, and they liked that very much. I wrote a draft with one of the writers that I do Arrow with, Mark Guggenheim, and another writer that has since gone off to do a bunch of other super hero stuff, named Michael Green — all three worked on it together. It was subsequently re-written and what they used for the movie was different than our version, but from there I developed a relationship with DC. So when I came back to my deal here at Warner Brothers four or five years ago, they said, “Which of the characters do you think would make a good TV show?” And I said, “I’d like to do an origin story of Green Arrow.” It unfurled from there.
To what extent did you grow up as a DC fan?
I was a DC fan; The Flash was always my favorite character. He was sort of the most average guy amongst all of these icons, even though he had super speed, you know? And he sort of felt the way I did about those other people, like, “Wow! Isn’t it really cool to hang out with Superman and Batman?”
When you were working on Everwood, and before that, Dawson’s Creek, were you itching to get at some genre stuff?
We did a show at the time called Jack and Bobby, and a lot of writers on that liked comic books. In a way, that show was an origin story of the president; I was realizing, “Oh, I like to use heart and emotion, but put it into these kind of stories, and I’d love to return to my roots.” So I went and met on a bunch of those films that everybody was trying to get off the ground at the time — before there was, you know, the super hero-palooza that’s happening now.
How did Supergirl appear on your radar?
We had a general state of the union meeting with the studio, and mentioned a couple of other DC properties. Susan Rovner, who’s the executive vice president and president of Warner Horizon Scripted Television, just kept saying, “Supergirl, Supergirl, Supergirl — how would you do it?” I said, “Well, I wouldn’t do it small, and I wouldn’t do it just for young people. I would try to do it for everyone.” That “S” was the most famous letter in the superhero alphabet, you know?
In my mind, it had a lot of possibility to be a big, broad show. So we added the workplace element and the adult sibling relationships. We made her not 17 but 24, and really just took a lot of the Superman/Supergirl mythology and lore, and put it into a show – what we thought would work for today’s audience.