This may not be 100 percent accurate, but if you cover the TV industry, hardly a week seems to go by without producer-writer Greg Berlanti having a pilot picked up.
The “Everwood” and “Brothers and Sisters” veteran has most recently been working to expand the presence of the DC Comics Universe on The CW.
“Arrow” launched in 2012 and immediately became on of The CW's foundational hits.
“The Flash” was loosely spun out of “Arrow” this season and has become the sort of breakout smash The CW has been search for years, reliably topping some of its competition on other networks.
And it was only a couple weeks ago that it was announced that Berlanti and his team are developing an elaborate “Arrow”/”Flash” spinoff featuring a slew of characters from both shows, including Brandon Routh's Atom, Victor Garber's Firestorm and Wentworth Miller's Captain Cold.
On the PaleyFest 2015 purple carpet on Saturday (March 14), I began my interview (featured above) with Berlanti by asking how many of him there are. His answer, as is always the case, was to be generous about the importance of his collaborators, including Andrew Kreisberg and Marc Guggenheim.
“Everybody kinda keeps stepping up, so that creates the space,” Berlanti said of his own personal point of over-extension.
Still, the possibility still exists that the “Flash”/”Arrow” spinoff could be running simultaneous to “Flash” and “Arrow,” rather than existing as an “Agent Carter”-style bridge between half-seasons.
“I think ultimately they would all exist at the same time, probably in the midseason of next year,” he teases.
Berlanti promises that each of the three shows will be distinctive.
“The team-up show honors the spirit of things like those Westerns like 'The Magnificent Seven' or those team-ups in the books, when it really, it takes a village,” he says.
As we've established, Berlanti notes, “There's a couple characters being plucked form each and then some new characters being brought in,” but he adds that the producers have a sense of how to keep the original shows from losing their distinctiveness.
In our purple carpet chat, Berlanti also talks about the challenges of creating stakes on “Arrow” after a midseason finale in which the title character seemed to die, a state that didn't last very long.
And as you may have read in my Emily Bett Rickards/Felicity's Jewishness interview, Berlanti weights in on how that Judaism came to pass on “Arrow.”
Check out the full Berlanti interview above.
“Arrow” returns to The CW on Wednesday, March 18.