supergirl-slice With the TCA winter press tour in full swing The CW brought out a bevy of talent this morning to talk about their upcoming programming.  For The Flash and Arrow panel a massive star-studded line up, including Stephen Amell, Grant Gustin, Katie Cassidy, Wentworth Miller, Brandon Routh and Dominic Purcell, took the stage alongside Executive Producers Greg Berlanti, Andrew Kreisberg, and Marc Guggenheim to discuss what's coming up on the hit superhero shows. Following the panel I joined a number of other journalists in speaking with Berlanti, and naturally the subject of CBS' upcoming Supergirl series came up.  Berlanti played his cards close to the vest but touched on the subjects of casting, bringing a female-led superhero show to the screen, the possibility of crossing over with Arrow or The Flash. Check out what he had to say after the jump, and look for the full interview with Berlanti and our panel recap soon. Where are you at with casting? Are we going to hear something soon? 
GREG BERLANTI:  I hope you hear about casting soon or we're not going to be able to make the pilot.
How is the casting process coming?  What are the challenges? 
BERLANTI:  As with all these things, there's only one person. I can’t imagine someone other than a lot of our actors playing these roles so I feel you're always just looking for that person.
supergirl-comic Do you want a fresh face? 
BERLANTI:  We have no preference that way. What is the tone of the show?  BERLANTI:  I would say it's tonally closer to The Flash than Arrow.
Does that mean more romantic? 
BERLANTI:  Well the nature of the character is a bit, and who we have in her life, who we're surrounding her with. Also, tonally I thought of those kind of characters in the DC universe.
Is there a possibility Supergirl crossing over with Arrow or The Flash? 
BERLANTI:  So much has to go right. We have to make a great show.  Again, I think of myself, if I were watching it I would want to see that, but we have to get so many things right to make a good show, and so much of it is luck unfortunately.
People have clamoring for a female led superhero project. How are you guys approaching that element of it? 
BERLANTI:  That was really important to all of us when we set out to working on it and it was really important to DC and it was really important to the women I'm working on the show with, the women that work at the studio and the women that work on the network.  In a lot of ways I'm surrounded by more women on the project that can answer the question better.
Did you learn any lessons from Wonder Woman
BERLANTI:  I think for us it's always about learning more from our own mistakes and our own successes.  So a show like Arrow and Flash without stuff I learned on Eli Stone and No Ordinary Family probably wouldn't exist in terms of visual effects and stunts, things like that.  Story wise, what we've learned on these shows, the thing we've always learned is how important casting is.  If you're right on the money and you have the kind of actors we have on these shows it just makes you look so much better.
Is the approach to the material different for CBS than it is for CW? 
BERLANTI:  No, I would say with each of them it's always, "How can we improve on what we've learned before?"  But no, we don't think about the shows in terms of networks that way. supergirl-comic-image