{"id":7892,"date":"2020-08-07T15:38:00","date_gmt":"2020-08-07T19:38:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/?p=7892"},"modified":"2020-08-07T15:44:41","modified_gmt":"2020-08-07T19:44:41","slug":"armstrong-in-prime-time-tv","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/2020\/08\/07\/armstrong-in-prime-time-tv\/","title":{"rendered":"Armstrong in Prime Time TV"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Health Professions Academic Building Becomes \u2018Savannah General\u2019 in NBC\u2019s Drama \u2018Council of Dads\u2019<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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When location scouts for NBC\u2019s new television series \u201cCouncil of Dads\u201d combed Savannah for a realistic venue to shoot multiple hospital scenes, they knew they had found something special in the Health Professions Academic Building on Georgia Southern University\u2019s Armstrong Campus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI set up a visit, came and looked at it and I was floored,\u201d said \u201cCouncil of Dads\u201d location scout and Armstrong Campus alumnus Anthony Paderewski (\u201905). \u201cI couldn\u2019t believe it. Basically, you have a backlot for a TV show here. It was absolutely perfect for what we were looking for. So that being said, I went and I talked to the producers and I got some pictures. We looked at the pictures and everyone was blown away.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cCouncil of Dads,\u201d which premiered on March 24, is based on the book by Savannah native Bruce Feiler and developed by former \u201cGrey\u2019s Anatomy\u201d co-showrunners Tony Phelan and Joan Rater, who also serve as executive producers on the series. The story follows Scott Perry, a father of five who, after receiving a cancer diagnosis, asks a group of friends to step in as father figures to his children in the event that he isn\u2019t around to see them grow up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt\u2019s an emotional family drama,\u201d explained \u201cCouncil of Dads\u201d co-executive producer and producing director Jonathan Brown. \u201cThe idea is to try and be as real as possible. And the show is telling the story of a family and what it means to be a family in this day and age. It\u2019s not just blood. The definition of family is growing, broadening with the types of relationships that are now included in a family. This is the story of one of those families that is made up of blood relationships, friendships, adoption and all those different kinds of things.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The show filmed almost entirely on location in the Savannah area for five months. Several of the scenes take place in a hospital, and the set has to be believable, multifaceted and offer the right aesthetic for television.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe try to find locations that look authentic, and Georgia Southern, this facility, is essentially a real hospital,\u201d Brown said, sitting in the lobby of the Health Professions Academic Building. \u201cEverything looks, and is, real.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBut because it\u2019s not in use on a daily basis as a working hospital, it\u2019s easier for Georgia Southern to let us film here. And it\u2019s easier for us to schedule it in our crazy schedule as we try to do all these different scenes all over town, plus work on stage. And it\u2019s beautiful and looks exactly like we want it to.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The 63,000-square-foot facility, designed to train future health care providers in a state-of-the-art interprofessional environment with a simulation suite and nursing and medical laboratory labs, became the major hospital location for \u201cCouncil of Dads.\u201d For the better part of three weeks, the Academic Building transformed into the fictional hospital, \u201cSavannah General,\u201d as scenes with two of the main characters, who are doctors, were filmed for the season premiere and two subsequent episodes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As the liaison between the actors and the show\u2019s staff of writers, who are headquartered in Los Angeles, Brown is largely responsible for maintaining the tone and \u201cvisual vocabulary\u201d of the show.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The hospital scenes, he said, were created with relative ease, given the pliability of Georgia Southern\u2019s Health Professions Academic Building.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cIt allows us a lot of freedom in staging and writing to possible scenes,\u201d noted Brown. \u201cFreedom because of the size of it, because of how good it looks, because of the flexibility of the spaces. You know, if we need it to be an operating room or a delivery room or recovery room or exam room or an ER, for example. We\u2019ve turned some of the bigger rooms into the corner of an ER. Plus, it has a beautiful nurses station. Georgia Southern\u2019s facility gives us flexibility and allows us to write without feeling too restricted.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Primarily, the true-to-life setting allows the University to provide exceptional education and training opportunities to help students succeed while addressing the health care needs of the region. The Waters College of Health Professions, housed in the Academic Building and Ashmore Hall, is the largest undergraduate health sciences college in the state of Georgia, and the University\u2019s allied health care programs represent almost one- fifth of all undergraduate health care degrees earned in Georgia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe use of the Health Professions Academic Building is validation that we are training our students for real-world health care settings,\u201d said Barry Joyner Ph.D., dean of the Waters College of Health Professions. \u201cThe goal for the building was to simulate a hospital setting, and we have accomplished that.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Paderewski, who graduated from Armstrong State University with a B.A. with a focus in theater and performance, enjoyed returning to campus to work with his alma mater.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt was neat to go back and see how the college has changed and what hasn\u2019t changed,\u201d he said. \u201cEspecially with it changing from Armstrong, yet it\u2019s still Armstrong. It still has the Armstrong feel, yet it\u2019s changed and it\u2019s under a new umbrella, but it still feels like home to me.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cCouncil of Dads\u201d was cancelled after one season. All episodes are available to watch on NBC or Hulu. \u2014 Melanie Sim\u00f3n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Health Professions Academic Building Becomes \u2018Savannah General\u2019 in NBC\u2019s Drama \u2018Council of Dads\u2019 When location scouts for NBC\u2019s new television series \u201cCouncil of Dads\u201d combed Savannah for a realistic venue to shoot multiple hospital scenes, they knew they had found something special in the Health Professions Academic Building on Georgia Southern University\u2019s Armstrong Campus. \u201cI […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":8078,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[64],"class_list":["post-7892","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-summer-2020"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7892","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7892"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7892\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8078"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7892"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7892"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7892"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}