Greg Berlanti makes room for family troubles and gay lives within familiar, accessible entertainment. We value that directness, though You shows how quickly the writing can turn from letting characters expose themselves to spelling out the lesson.
Fi1m perspective
In You (2018), a bookshop manager explains himself as his interest in a customer becomes an obsessive pursuit. Joe Goldberg's voice-over gives Penn Badgley a second way to make an apparently promising encounter feel wrong. We were unsettled by the gap between Joe's account of himself and the surveillance it attempts to justify. Co-creators Greg Berlanti and Sera Gamble make an entertaining thriller from his self-justification, with a welcome streak of black comedy.
Writing on Dawson's Creek (1998), then creating Everwood (2002), gave Berlanti an early grounding in coming-of-age and family drama. Arrow (2012) began the move into a shared superhero universe, where emotion and humour remained part of the appeal alongside spectacle. That is a useful instinct for serial television, which needs a reason for us to return once the immediate threat has been dealt with.
His recurring inclusion of LGBTQ+ characters belongs to that approach. He has made their stories part of mainstream television, and directed the gay romantic comedy Love, Simon (2018). We value the decision to give those stories the familiar pleasures of family drama and romance, without requiring a different audience to come and watch them.
In You, the movement between psychological threat and black comedy gives the writing room to be nasty without becoming monotonous. Gaston Jaren Lopez and Troy Takaki are among the editors who give those shifts their pace. The trouble comes when the plot reaches for another complication before examining the last one. Berlanti and Gamble can keep us watching, but sometimes hurry past the questions that made us interested.
You is also weaker when the pair turn to warnings about online vanity and literary pretension. The jokes broaden and the programme insists on pointing out faults Joe has already exposed. Badgley's performance and the self-justifying voice-over give us plenty to consider without the additional instruction. For an introduction to Berlanti, try You for the tension and allow for the occasional lecture.
Biography
Greg Berlanti is an American screenwriter, producer and director. He began his career as a writer on Dawson's Creek in 1998 and went on to create series including Everwood and Jack & Bobby.
Berlanti founded Berlanti Productions in 2000. He is known for executive producing and writing on numerous television series, among them Arrow (2012), The Flash (2014), Riverdale (2017), Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (2018) and You (2018), on which he is credited as creator and teleplay writer. He directed the 2018 film Love, Simon.
