Interview with "Greek" creator Patrick Sean Smith

The cast of Greek

AE: There’s been such a big deal going on about As The World Turns and daytime’s first gay kiss in history that happened six months ago and the fact that characters haven’t kissed since.
SS: That’s really not the way we want to go. Having worked with Greg Berlanti, I feel like I had a great opportunity to see good storytelling, but also doing the things that you want to do and things that you want to put out there, but doing them at the right time as opposed to doing it just to say we were blah, blah, blah in history.

AE: Could you give a quick rundown of how Greek came to be?
Sean Smith: I wrote Greek on spec as just a show that I really wanted to see. Nothing had really been done in a college setting in a one-hour format that had the kind of the comedy that I wanted to see. Yet shows like Grey’s Anatomy and Ugly Betty were pushing the envelope comedically in one-hour format, so it made sense to me to try that in a young adult genre college show.

AE: I was a huge fan of it last season, and as a 33-year old, it was kind of a guilty pleasure to enjoy a show about college students.
SS: As a fellow 33-year older, I’d worked on shows before that catered more to a younger audience, and I appreciated it, but I also wanted to do something that my peers could watch with me and we could all kind of enjoy it on a different level, which is a lot of hints to the eighties movies and pop culture and that sort of thing.

AE: You said you were not in a fraternity yourself. Did you go to a school that had a Greek system?
SS: Yeah, I went to the University of Texas at Austin and I had a lot of friends that were in it. I grew up in a small town in Texas of 4000 people and Austin itself as a town of 500,000 scared the crap out of me. The idea of joining a social organization was too daunting for me.

AE:Did you pull from your friends’ experiences or your perception of the Greek system at all in deciding to put a gay character into the universe of show?
SS: There are a lot of odd rituals that happen in fraternity houses. Given my perspective and my point of view and my voice, I felt that putting a gay character around that kind of shed some light on how they work in context, but taken out of context, it looks kind of like . . . gay porn?

So for me and having a character that I can relate to as a gay man who grew up in Texas and had that experience in college where I wasn’t out yet, but was learning who I was and learning people’s reactions and just kind of how to live.

AE: It’s interesting you bring that up because I am a huge fan of 80s horror movies, which seem to always punch up the homoerotic element of fraternities. It’s funny because knowing a gay man was behind this show and there’s a gay character and it kind of has that sensibility to it, I was actually really impressed that the show doesn’t go there directly and make the obvious jokes about fraternities. Were you consciously careful not to overstep any lines when it came to that?
SS: Absolutely. I think for me, I come from the outsider’s perspective of the Greek system as a place that has a lot of great opportunity for life lessons and it felt too easy to be critical and you’d seen it a million times before. So kind of what I wanted to do in the pilot is show these characters who look like the stereotypes that you’ve seen before so an audience can relate to them, but once you get to know them, you see the layers.

Calvin (Paul James)

AE: How did Calvin come about? Where did he come from?
SS: I knew that I wanted Rusty to bond with somebody quickly out of the rush experience as somebody who could kind of be his leader through it a little bit. To me it was interesting to have somebody who, while Rusty wanted to be in it so badly, Calvin kind of had no interest in it, given his family situation and given how the stereotypes went and what preconceived notions he had about fraternities.

He could kind of remove himself from it and not put so much pressure on himself as Rusty was freaking out in the rush. And then I just thought that there was so much more opportunity in keeping him in the closet from the fraternity for the first ten episodes, and you know kind of playing the fun of that. But I always knew that by the end of that first cycle, he would have to be out and then have to kind of deal with the realities of that.

AE: After having seen so many shows where there are gay characters who just vanish once they come out, it was so great to be able to put these new episodes in and say, “Oh, there’s Calvin again! I thought he would have been on a bus out of town by now!”
SS: I think Calvin’s relationships are just as interesting as Rusty’s because they’re both 18-year old guys in college trying to figure out what kind of relationships they want in life and figuring out what it is that they need in a partner and what they want and what they can offer. It just seems at that age, you’re coming out of high school and you’re kind of starting fresh. So I thought that for both characters, there’s plenty of good storytelling to be had, as opposed to having Calvin fall to the background.