Another question: Why hasn't a TV series about high school in America never succeeded past four years? (I can't speak for the rest of the world.) I never watched TV much, but I'll rattle off a few shows about high schoolers that I remember: Room 222, Welcome Back Kotter, Fame, Beverly Hills 90210, ​Dobie Gillis, Saved By The Bell.

     Answer: because the shows always focused on the students, and, after four years, (actually more like three), the actors would grow out of their roles, and the shows would tank shortly thereafter, generally speaking.

     I have no idea when this idea first came to me, it's one of those that, it seems to me, I've always had, but I always thought it'd have been great to create a TV show that focused on the high school rather than the students. In my series, no matter how big a superstar some actor in the senior class got, they would "graduate" and leave the series, at least as a student, after four years. I visualized the series flavored with a bit of Love Boat in the sense that only the teachers and staff would return every season, and flavored with a bit of Saturday Night Live in the sense that some actors would be leaving the series while others would be joining it for the first time every season, and flavored with a bit of American Idol in the sense that, at the beginning of every new season, the "freshman class" would, in all likelihood, be a group of charismatic teens groomed and desperate for stardom.

     In my personal imaginative universe, this series began, not on television, but on radio, right after World War II, which makes it now, some seventy years later, the longest series of any kind running. It was a part of every American's coming of age in the Twentieth Century to follow my high school series during the years they, themselves, went to high school, then follow the actors who starred in the show the years they watched. And now, of course, in the Twenty-First Century, you can stream all seventy years of the series as well as attend the yearly conventions. Many documentaries have been done over the decades concerning the changing social mores of the Twentieth Century as reflected by my series.

     Ideas for new stories or how to add facets to ongoing stories occur to me all the time, and it's a part of my daily thinking processes to obsessively search through them for ones that I might be able to use. 99.9% of them disappear mist-like within a few seconds, they are so tissue thin. Others stick around. 

     This particular idea refused to budge from my inner imaginative universe, but instead, as you can see, developed and swelled with each passing year. One of the reasons it stuck around so long was that it was so impossible, imagining a program that began before I was born. It was a program that, in reality, could not possibly happen.

     And then, last spring...

CONTINUE