Interview with Greg Berlanti

AE: Speaking of that show, I know the landmark gay kiss on Dawson's Creek was a really big deal to the WB. I think I read somewhere that you guys spent about a year convincing the network to greenlight it.
GB: Yeah, I was running the show at the time, and that was sort of the first gay kiss between two male characters on network television. At least the first romantic kiss. There'd been sort of that joke kiss between Will and Jack on Will & Grace, but there hadn't ever been a real, romantic kiss — certainly not one between two male teenagers.

AE: You know it's funny, because on Brothers & Sisters, Kevin seems to lock lips with someone almost every other week.
GB: The world's changed in seven years. It's great!

AE: I know it's probably different at ABC [as opposed to the old WB].
GB: It's also a different time. There are just younger executives these days. At the time — you know, six or seven years ago — there were still a lot of people who had been executives for 10, 15 years that, you know, were just older. It was a generational shift that happened.

The executives are my age now as opposed to 10 or 15 years older than me, and they've grown up in a post-Will & Grace world and a post-Six Feet Under world. I think Six Feet Under as much as anything did so much to move forward what it means to tell a story about a gay man. And you can't live in a post-Six Feet Under world and tell mature, adult story lines without gay characters kissing where everyone else would kiss.

AE: So you think it's behind the scenes — younger studio execs — as opposed to viewer reactions that are driving increased gay visibility on television? It seems to me — I'm looking from the outside of course, so you can tell me if I'm wrong — but there doesn't seem to be a lot of negative public push-back to Kevin's love life on Brothers & Sisters.
GB: Absolutely, and I think because the people who were assistants 10 years ago have become executives now, they are less afraid of what people are going to say because they've seen now that it's not such a big deal. Whereas the last batch of execs was maybe living with their fears of 10, 15 years ago.

A large part of it though is cultural. The culture at ABC is just, I think, very supportive, and just maybe they have their finger a little bit more on the pulse. Certainly no one has an agenda of "well, let's see as much man-on-man action as possible." The agenda instead is: "Hey, we want the story lines for all of our characters to be as interesting and as thoughtful and mature and real as they can possibly be."

AE: I spoke with Matthew Rhys a few weeks ago — very cool guy — and he seemed very comfortable playing a gay role, and yet there do seem to be a lot of straight actors out there who do seem to have a lot of hang-ups or are nervous about it.
GB: Absolutely. I think the magic of Kevin — I always say it's been a confluence of a couple of different things — I think one of those things is just that Robbie Baitz hadn't developed in television before. So he came to it fresh and saw an opportunity to put a gay character on that maybe other people that develop shows every year would have been used to the no's from the networks and would have felt a little bit more of the resistance.

AE: So self-censorship, you mean?
GB: Exactly. Self-censorship in knowing how, with a series, how hard it is — or was, traditionally — to get those story lines for gay characters to have just as rich kinds of stories. In those days you'd hear [from the network execs]: "Yeah, but wasn't there just a gay character on …" or whatever. Robbie sort of created a character that was fresh.

And then you have someone as talented as Matthew [Rhys] who steps into the role, and he brings such an A-game to it. And then there's just a natural progression of the writers and the studio saying: "Oh my God, we want to see more of that character! We want to see more of his internal and personal life."

And then combine it with the fact that everybody here sort of feels like there's an opportunity to tell real, contemporary story lines about what it means to be a single, gay man in Los Angeles today. So that confluence of things is what's responsible for Kevin's character being as interesting and dynamic as he is.

AE: I'm curious — beyond Kevin and Brothers & Sisters, are there other shows on TV that have particularly impressed you with how they deal with gay characters and story lines?
GB: Gosh, that's a great question. You know, I'm not unimpressed by anybody. However, I do think there was a void before Kevin came along. You know, I think one of the groups that actually deserves a lot of the credit [for increased gay visibility] is actually reality television.

I think reality TV has done as much as scripted TV for forwarding the image of gay men and women, because they show real people. So what they say and do on television can't be controlled in quite the same way. It can be edited, but if you look at a lot of the landmark gay characters on television — a lot of them were real people. For example Pedro [Zamora] on Real World, and Richard Hatch [on Survivor]. To know that someone could be a villain, and nobody attributed it to him being gay.

AE: It was a landmark, definitely.
GB: Yeah. So I think the advent of reality TV — I think it blew open the lid also for what it means to portray a gay character.