Collins Hill High School

**Collins Hill High School** is a coming-of-age soap opera based on Collins Hill High School which has been broadcast by ADTV nationwide since 1983. The series is set in the fictional city of Collins Hill, Georgia, which the city is based in Lawrenceville, Georgia. The show was created by Jamie Nguyen, Hayden Ford, Tom Larsson, and Kim-Tae-Ho. The show consists of students, staff, and parents' everyday lives residing near Collins Hill High School. Within five months of launching the show, it gained massive success and lots of popularity, ranked #1 on magazines' top TV shows, and has consistently ranked among the most famous and top-rated series in The United States. Three of the Collins Hill High School Episodes were ranked among the top 10 most-watched TV shows in The United States, including the number one spot on the September 23, 1986 episode titled "Eli Gets Bullied", which gained a rating of over 39.4 in the Nielsen Rankings and had approximately 49.7 million views during its debut. Collins Hill High School has been very important in the history of American television, tackling many issues around American society and accurately portraying American society in ways that have never been seen before on television. The show is long-running and continues airing on ADTV nationwide today.

Since creator Hayden Ford grew up in Gwinnett County, the themes heavily shown at Collins Hill High School are friendship and trust, and each character is supposed to have their place near Collins Hill High. The Smiths, O'Brians, Sanchezes, Sanders, and Williams are some of the families central to the soap's notable and dramatic storylines. Collins Hill High School has been filmed by the former ATBC Studios (Now Liberty Atlanta) around Gwinnett County since its inception, with a set that is on-site and off-site of Collins Hill High School. In 1990, Liberty, ADTV, and ITV announced that Collins Hill High School would have its set rebuilt in the new Collins Hill High School building by 1994. In late July 1994, filming commenced here, and in August 1994, it was used on-screen for the first time. Liberty announced that it would demolish its old set used from 1982 as a pilot episode to 1994. Demolition commenced on September 4th, 1994.

Collins Hill High School has received lots of praise and a few aspects of criticism for the many issues it covers, such as murder, rape, abusive families, toxic relationships, and bullying. It has a handful of criticism for a couple of storylines, including the 2009 "Who Framed Jamie?" storyline, which has received multiple complaints from police officers across America, The United Kingdom, and other countries, as well as complaints for too much violence and allegations of racism, offensive stereotypes, and being too hateful towards the police. However, Collins Hill High School has been given praise for representing real-life issues and spreading awareness on social topics. Because of this, the cast and crew have received and been nominated for various awards.

## History

### Conceptions and Preparations for Broadcast

In May 1980, three years before Collins Hill High School's first episode had been broadcast, the show was a vague idea between many minds of the ADTV, Liberty, ATBC, and ITV's staff, who decided that ADTV needed a bi-weekly coming-of-age soap opera set on teenagers, boost profits towards its youth programming, and would attract a mass audience like Brawl Stars on BTV (Birmingham Television). Rutherford McAully, then the head of series and serials, first approached a team of well-established show producers and a script editor named Hayden Ford, Kim Tae-Ho, Jamie Nguyen, and Tom Larsson. This team had previously worked on a show called "Back into the Realm." McAully presented them with a vague outline: two episodes per week, 52 weeks per year. On May 13th, 1981, Ford, Tae-Ho, Nguyen, and Larsson put their ideas down on paper and proposed that the set be located at Central Gwinnett High School, which could accommodate 2,500 students. BTV granted Ford full access to the production of "Brawl Stars" at a rural high school for a month so he could gain insight into the process of producing a continuing drama.

Initially, there were concerns about whether the general audience would embrace a new television series based on teenagers in the eastern suburbs of Atlanta. However, a study commissioned by prominent ADTV figures revealed that viewers would prefer a soap opera set outside of the eastern Atlanta metro area, rather than one set within it. Despite these doubts, the creators, along with McAully, confidently assured the ADTV figures that it would not make an actual difference once if it happened to be one of the longest-running shows in American television history. This marked the beginning of a strong and ongoing partnership between Collins Hill High School and audience research, which, though now commonplace, was quite revolutionary.

Half of its creators have lived in Gwinnett County together in their childhoods and teenhoods, although Kim Tae Ho was born in Incheon, South Korea, and Nguyen in Arlington, Texas. However, when they researched deeper into how to make a long-running soap opera, they found massive changes in areas they thought they knew well; however, delving further into the city of Lawrenceville, they found exactly what they had been searching for; a real Collins Hill spirit, an inward-looking quality, a trust of friends and teenagers' independency, a sense of territory and community that the creators simply summed up as "People have denied our points, but it goes nowhere with our likeliness of success at all.".

While developing Collins Hill High School, McAully, Ford, Tae-Ho, Nguyen, and Larsson looked back at prominent figures such as Liberty Center from Liberty Television, Coronation Street from ITV, and a few other soap operas. They even looked at a British soap opera that has undergone similarly to what happened to *Good Times* named "*Market in Honey Lane"*. However, they realized that a few of the soap operas felt "a little bit too outdated" and had a "dull view of working-class life". Once after Collins Hill High School started airing, and featured characters with disabilities and neurological disorders, such as Eli Carson, who is autistic, John Marquez, who has Down syndrome, and Drew Johnston, who has ADHD. It inspired Liberty Center and other soap operas to add characters with disabilities in 1984. They concluded that Liberty Center and a few other soap operas are getting too aged with how the media represent youth today, and Collins Hill High School would be required to attract a unique, more socially extensive, and inclusive audience, promising that it's got the longevity to retain it for many years thereafter. They also looked at Sesame Street to include government and private organization funding, but the crew lacked the fundamental resources because they wanted to go for a more commercialized version of Collins Hill High School, so they decided to put informative morals at the end of each episode with the appropriate educative concepts for commercial television.

A former US soap opera set in the eastern Atlanta metro area was ATBC's *Good Times.* From 1963 to 1964, the show switched from one showing a week to two in three separate series (the latter was shown in various time slots across some of the ADTV networks). The show has a very different style and approach to Collins Hill High School and is set in a Junior High School in Duluth taking its view on American society with puberty, teens, and many more issues. Critic Joe Ceaser described *Good Times* with his remark: "It was not a well-rounded show, and precisely not paving the way in any revolutionary ways in technique and production but cited itself to the average viewer as a decent show with entertaining characters, informative plots, and brings morals at the end of each episode astonishingly.

The target launch date was initially February 1983, in which McAully, Ford, Tae-Ho, Nguyen, and Larsson had up to thirteen months in which to write, cast, and shoot the entire thing; however, in January 1982, they didn't choose a city or area to have its spot located at. McAully, Ford, Tae-Ho, Nguyen, and Larsson were dissatisfied with the February 1983 launch date, stating that it should start later in August 1983 or even September 1983 to stay realistic to how a school year works in an American school district, but the ADTV and ITV carried on with its idea to get the studio Lorimar Television operational, February was the most realistic date; however, this was later to be changed to March 15th, 1983 to satisfy the crew with an extended month of producing episodes.

#### Initial Character Creation and Preparation

After they decided to set the show on ATBC Lawrenceville, the creators discussed and set about creating characters that would suit teenagers in a realistic, but unique way in two weeks. They took a 1-week vacation in London and began to create the characters. Ford created the Johnston siblings, including Eli, Max, and Louanne, with David Sanchez taking on Ford's background. The Johnston siblings were raised in an upper-middle-class family with a mom, a dad, and two pet dogs Cha-Cha and Justice. McAully created an artistic and mindful character for the creators named Micheal, which Micheal is loosely based on an American modernist painter and draftswoman Georgia O'Keeffe, an artist McAully met a few times in person while walking down the streets of North Buckhead. Tae-Ho created the O'Brien siblings, which are Dean, Scott, and Chara. Nguyen created Pauline, an inspiring and funny comedian who makes people laugh.

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