Exclusive Interview: Greg Berlanti

Prolific writer, executive producer and director Greg Berlanti has been involved in a number of network TV series including Dawson’s Creek, Everwood, which he created, and Dirty Sexy Money. His production company Berlanti Television is producing two shows for ABC, Brothers & Sisters, which started its fifth season, and No Ordinary Family, the freshman series that features a family whose members discover they have superpowers and have to learn to control them. While Brothers & Sisters has been the number one show at 10 p.m. on Sundays among women 18-49 for three out of four weeks so far this season, No Ordinary Family is holding its own against the megahits NCIS and Glee. Berlanti talks about the creating new shows and keeping established shows fresh.

WS: Where did the idea for No Ordinary Family come from?
BERLANTI: Jon Feldman, who I worked with before on two other shows, Dawson’s Creek and Dirty Sexy Money, and is a divorced dad, came to me and said, “I feel that my family is broken and I want to write a story about how a family comes back together because of something special that happens to them. What do you think about a family that gets superpowers?" I had co-written the Green Lantern film [about a test pilot who receives a mystical green ring that gives him superpowers] that is coming out next summer, and I had worked on family shows. [No Ordinary Family] just seemed like the perfect blending of the two: we could do a family show that had real network-style event act breaks [when the script reaches a strong dramatic moment], but we weren’t trying to create fights between family members just to have an act break, and [we could add the superpower element]. I thought those were very fun tones we could blend and one balanced out the other.

WS: What served as inspiration for the show?
BERLANTI: A real touch point for me was a lot of the action shows I watched with my parents when I was growing up. We all sat around and watched The Six Million Dollar Man, The Bionic Woman, The Greatest American Hero, Charlie’s Angels, and they had action and they had fun, but they also had something that we could all enjoy and [provided] a real entry point for everybody, with a storyline for everyone and a favorite character for everyone. And it seemed like nowadays at 8 o’clock there was a real absence of those shows on television. They were a little tongue and cheek, but they were also really smart. And finally in terms of No Ordinary Family being a superhero show, we felt in the last two or three years, visual effects had taken enough of a leap forward that we could do something on television, on a weekly basis, that didn’t look too silly. Those were our goals.

WS: Superpowers do not exist in everyday life, but the special effects in the series work. As a viewer you are not saying, “Oh come on now, that’s not possible!” How did you decide how to use special effects?
BERLANTI: We wanted to use each of the powers to speak to something emotional for each of the characters. In Jim Powell, the father, you have a guy who feels powerless in his marriage and his life isn’t going where he wants and he gets his strength back. In Daphne, the daughter, you have a girl who’s only focused on herself and her own world, and suddenly she has to hear every body else’s thoughts. The mom, Stephanie, feels stretched too thin and can’t be everywhere at once—any mom in America, any mom anywhere, can identify with that feeling—and she can suddenly be anywhere in a split second. And JJ, the son who feels different because of a learning disability, suddenly is a super genius.
That was our starting point, which is wish fulfillment for families. And the more that you are learning about them emotionally and you watch those powers expressed, the more it’s not visual effects for visual effects’ sake, and the more they feel like they fit in with the rest of show.

WS: How did you get the banter between all the family members so true to life?
BERLANTI: I always liked families that really aren’t afraid to lovingly express what they’re thinking about in [given] a moment, and that are vocal with one another. That really works on TV and it’s liberating [for a] whole family watching it together because maybe you are a kid who wants to talk that way to your parents but you don’t. Or maybe you are a parent or a spouse who wishes you felt like your partner was more involved in the relationship or more involved in raising the kids. I find that as long as there is love and you feel the relationship and the bond between all of characters, that they can be very expressive.

WS: You received an order from ABC for 13 episodes for No Ordinary Family. Have you planned out the story arcs all the way through or do you work episode by episode?
BERLANTI: We do a little bit of both. We have major signposts that we work toward for the first 13 so the audience feels a sense of crescendo toward something. And we have ideas for the back nine episodes for sure. So everything feels like there is set up and pay off over [the course of the] episodes. But the episodes are also very close ended, it’s not like the series Heroes. There is a bit of a mythology in No Ordinary Family. Jim is out trying to fight crime every week. There is a real sense of his learning process as he is trying to fight crime and [deal with] the kinds of criminals he’s up against—most are without superpowers and every now and then we throw in another super villain. Again, we hope we have just enough mythology to draw people back, but it should play like a close-ended family show that you can miss [an episode] and still catch up. In the same way I downloaded the three new episodes of Modern Family that I had never seen, I was just able to hop in and enjoy them for what they were. Hopefully I think we’ve captured that with this show.

WS: Brothers & Sisters is another one of your shows and it started its fifth year. What are the challenges of going into the fifth season of any series and keeping it fresh?
BERLANTI: David Marshall Grant was the showrunner last year and will be the showrunner again this year. I think his challenge, and the advice I offer him, is character shows usually only make it four or five years. But the ones that have gone nine years or ten years, are the ones that find a real sense of rebirth in their fourth or fifth year. In Brothers & Sisters, there has been some attrition in the cast; some people have left. But that is also an opportunity to bring in new faces and still hopefully keep the core of what the show is. In the premiere episode [last month] there was a reveal that we leapt a year forward and that gives a whole other level of mystery to the show. It’s not like we’re jumping forward five years or six years and so much has happened that the audience feels disoriented. There is a specific reason why we have not shown pieces from [that missing] year and we’ll go back and show them throughout [this season] so every episode has it’s own mystery to it.
We were the only Sunday night show [whose ratings] did not dip in its premiere episode. That is always a good sign that you wrote a good finale [to the previous season] and wrote a good season opener because a lot of people were asking the right questions when they came back and that demonstrates some real strength to the show. 

WS: You have an embarrassment of riches with your cast—what talent.
BERLANTI: That is true; and that’s always been for me what makes Brothers & Sisters an event. It’s really hard to say what makes a character show an event because you are not blowing things up and you are not shooting people. What makes that show an event is watching Rachel Griffiths, Calista Flockhart and Sally Field and the rest of the cast act. And when you get to see them doing those scenes every week—that is what makes it different than just another character show.

WS: You have two shows on the air and you directed the movie Life as We Know It, which recently premiered in the U.S. How do manage so many different projects?
BERLANTI: I work with a lot of the same people and they all come out of TV. TV is the toughest just because there is really always something going on. You are always prepping a couple episodes and shooting an episode, and you are always in post-production on two or three episodes, and trying to come up with two other episodes, and that’s really what teaches you how to balance multiple things. And it also teaches you how to generate stories quickly and not be timid about taking stories in different directions. I was really blessed this last year, while we were working on the pilot of No Ordinary Family, I went and shot the film Life as We Know It that stars Katherine Heigl and Josh Duhamel, who both also come out of television. Katie is from Grey’s Anatomy, another ABC show, [and Josh was in Las Vegas and Crossing Jordan]. I hope Life as We Know It does well and finds an audience, too. You never know.

WS: What do you like most about what you do?
BERLANTI: I like that every day I’m working on a different kind of story; it’s never the same. I tend to be involved with shows in which we don’t have to do the same thing every week; we can change it up, so I don’t feel like I’m writing the same crime procedural every week or I have to come in and do the same thing. That keeps my creativity up and then the same or more than that, I like the kinds of storytellers that my work has introduced me to and the kinds of people I’ve gotten to work with. They are all really inspiring and great individuals.

WS: You worked on Dirty Sexy Money, which was about the rich and powerful and in No Ordinary Family you are exploring another form of power.
BERLANTI: Dirty Sexy Money was a kind of dysfunctional family as well. That was more an attempt, as much as anything, to see if we could do a cable show on network television, in other words, what are the boundaries now? Because when I was younger, the soaps would do something scandalous every week and there was nobody competing with them. [So our attempt was] can we do an intelligent soap that pushed the boundaries and we did it to some success, perhaps creatively, but not a ratings success. I learned a lot from that and again I worked with great people.