The Season’s New Rock ‘n’ Roll High School

Gil Grant jokes that it felt like he’d been grazed by a Mike Tyson uppercut when NBC executives told him they wanted to produce his mischievous script about life between classes at a contemporary high school, but only if he could figure out a way to transform it into a musical. He wasn’t knocked out, but it took him a couple days to shake out the cobwebs and climb up off the mat.

“At first I thought, ‘Oh great. I’m the guy who in the ‘60s, while everyone else was going to The Doors concert, was home watching Dean Martin on television every Thursday night,’ ” said Grant, a 40-year-old, bearded man with an earring, who created “The Oldest Rookie” and wrote for years for “Eight Is Enough.” “I told them, ‘Sure, if you want a hip high school show, you’ve really come to the right person.’ ”

While Steven Bochco has sniped that “Hull High,” which at one time was called “Hull Street High,” only became a musical because ABC already had bought his musical, “Cop Rock,” executives at NBC and Disney, which is producing the show, said that they collectively decided that just doing a comedy about high school wasn’t enough “to hook the audience.”

“The script was terrific. It was very funny,” said Garth Ancier, president of network television production at Disney. “But we thought it needed one extra piece to really make it special. There were a number of ideas bandied about. NBC had aired a musical a few years back called ‘Rags to Riches’ that had a real vitality to it. And Disney has the tradition of being in the musical form, and so we all wanted to try it. There was a great belief that a musical could succeed.”

Even when musicals, especially “Rags to Riches,” have bombed as series?

“I think television has under-realized the potential of music in series programs,” said Perry Simon, NBC’s executive vice president of prime-time programs. “If you have the creative forces to make it work, music gives you a tremendous upside with the audience. But the show has to succeed on its own dramatic merits, with strong characters, stories and relationships. Music cannot make a difference if it’s being used as a crutch.”

Grant, the show’s executive producer, hired Kenny Ortega, the choreographer from the film “Dirty Dancing,” as co-executive producer and primary director of the show. Then he retooled the script, looking for ways to inject music. The first thing he hit on was a rapping Greek chorus of four teen-agers, who serve as the conscience of the school and thread the story lines together with an ongoing commentary in rap.

“Then we had to figure out how to do the bigger musical numbers,” Grant said. “And we decided to come at it either out of fantasy or something we call heightened reality. Like the opening number in the pilot, it’s just the high school band and drill team practicing out in front of the school, but it’s the greatest band and drill team in the country.”

The pilot, which has already aired twice on NBC, also featured an adolescent boy’s fantasy that shows the sexiest, youngest teacher in America, decked out in a tight leather outfit, singing and dancing about similes and metaphors and writhing provocatively on a huge volume of “Longfellow’s Collected Works.” A future episode will showcase a young female libertine trying to infiltrate the all-boys wrestling team in a smoky dance that is half wrestling, half ballet. Another episode has a rap version of “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall” that denounces drinking on a school field trip.

But, mostly, the show reminisces with great energy and some innocent raunchiness about Grant’s own high school experience in Arizona. “I didn’t want it to be ‘TV 101’ or ‘The Bronx Zoo’ because my experience of high school wasn’t some preachy and sanctimonious issue of the week. It was a series of fragments and stories and problems that happened between Period 1 and at your locker going to Period 2.”

To that end, the scripts are written first, with an eye toward ironing out the story lines and plot twists, and then Grant and his music people go back through them to see where a music or dance sequence might enhance the action. Often, during the actual production, Grant said that Ortega will choreograph a whimsical dance bit at the last minute.

Unlike “Cop Rock,” all of the music is prerecorded. And while the primary actors do their own dancing, most of them lip-sync the songs to the voices of professional singers.

Even with the prerecordings, to meet budget and time constraints, subsequent episodes of the show will contain far less elaborate production numbers than the pilot. Grant said that regular episodes will at most feature one full-scale number and several other smaller musical bits.

Still, Grant says that the show costs 30% more than the average drama. Disney’s Ancier would only say that his company will spend more on this series than any other hourlong show it currently has in the works. Disney is willing to suffer a rather large financial hit initially, Ancier said, because it believes the show’s music and its hip MTV attitude will make it a viable and lucrative product in the syndication market several years down the road.

NBC has deliberately programmed “Hull High” in a time period (Sundays at 7 p.m.) that has been devoid of programs for teen-agers since Fox moved “21 Jump Street” to a different night a year ago. It is doubtful that “Hull High’s” ratings will ever surpass “60 Minutes,” but it does provide an alternative to the news magazine and to ABC’s more serious-minded drama, “Life Goes On.” Fox will compete this season with two new sitcoms, including “Parker Lewis Can’t Lose,” another rambunctious series set in a modern day high school.

“We might get lucky,” Grant said. “Just because of the sheer amount of music out there today. It’s such a huge portion of kids’ lives. It infiltrates everything. We really do give those kids something to watch at that hour and I think something for adults to watch with their kids.”