A group of innocent people are captured and forced onto a stage-like prison where they are coerced into acting out scenarios for the amusement of a mysterious audience.

Dierdre Gates

In the outside world, Dierdre was a normal person with friends and family and a life. Then, one day, she woke up in a strange house, made up of rooms that were only three-quarters complete. And from the incomplete walls came laughter and gasps and other reactions to whatever happened within the house. Joined by four strangers, and the occasional “guest” thrown in, Dierdre is apparently meant to be putting on some sort of entertainment for an unknown audience.

Rob Flanders

Rob has adapted to the imprisonment by trying to give the audience what he thinks they want. He hams it up for the crowd and plays along with whatever storyline they seem to be trying to generate, convinced that once they are satisfied they will release him and the others back into the world. Dierdre completely disagrees with him.

Mateo Leoni

Mateo is convinced that the five of them are dead and are in some sort of purgatory, or are in an alien space zoo, or it is all a dream. He has a million theories for what is going on, and will alter his behaviour to adjust to whichever theory is prominent at any given time, making him a real wild card.

Oscar Wiffle

Oscar is just as confused as the others, but he just goes with the flow. He doesn’t try to ham it up like Rob, but he also doesn’t try to escape. The prisoners have free food, working television, and occasional events to break up the monotony. This place seems as good as anywhere else, he figures.

Charlotte Dennis

Charlotte is swayed by the whims of the others. She is convinced by Dierdre’s insistence that they try to escape, but also understands Rob’s plan to go along with the captors. She’s also developed a bit of a crush on Mateo and occasionally goes along with his nonsense plots.

This would be a show in which characters are tortured for the amusement of an audience, for the amusement of us. My theory is that the audience is bored wizards.

It’s your average workplace-set show, except the workplace is the high stakes world of professional knifefighting.

Maddy Edge

Maddy is a smart young woman who could be doing a lot of things with her life, but instead she is trying to make it in the male-dominated world of professional knifefighting. She isn’t the first woman to join the sport, but she intends to be the first to work her way up to the title of World Knifefighting Champion.

Yvonne Hale

Yvonne Hale is not a knifefighter, but is the kind of person who dabbles in as many shady dealings as possible, and so she has started assembling a stable of knifefighters she sponsors in various underground fights throughout the world. She treats them well enough, not withstanding her acerbic wit, and is just kooky and rich enough to enable their outlandish ideas to raise their fame.

Sullivan Roberts

Sullivan is a knifefighter who takes the sport very seriously. After years of training himself to feel no pain, he has also dulled his emotions to an almost robotic point. Nonetheless, he has a bit of a crush on Maddy and doesn’t at all know how to handle it. This has been affecting his performance in the ring.

Walt Rudyard

Walt is the opposite of Sullivan. He’s all emotions all the time. He was once a homeless man who was paid to knifefight by some rappers on the West Coast, but he turned out to be very good at it, so Yvonne got him under contract. In his good moods, Walt is very supportive of Maddy and is always trying to come up with ideas to raise the team’s profile, such as barbed-wire-rope-bridge matches. Audiences love him.

Evan Torrington

Evan is currently the highest-ranked fighter in Yvonne’s stable of fighters and boy is he a jerk. He is one of those “macho” guys who thinks that only men can really be good at knifefighting (and he’s also pretty racist). Maddy would live to fight him, but they both work for Yvonne. For now, Evan is just an annoyance she can use to motivate herself to be better.

Moreso than any other idea I’ve come up with so far, this show would have a jaunty 80s-sitcom-style theme song. That is a must.

A single father raising twin boys continually has to come to grips with the fact that his kids have minds of their own. It says so in the title.

Cleavon Kane

As a psychologist, Cleavon has devoted his life to the study of the mind, but no matter how much he thinks he knows, his sons continue to be a baffling puzzle to him.

CJ Kane

CJ is the “oldest” of the twins and he always reminds his brother of that. CJ is a bleeding heart liberal who wants to devote himself to improving the world even if it means dying in the process. If he could, he’s spend every waking moment helping the less fortunate, and then the sleeping moments too. He is known to make grand moralizing speeches to his “younger” brother.

JC Kane

JC is the serious one of the two. He wants nothing more than to make it into big business and get Rich with a capitalist R. He isn’t without a sense of humour, though, and will often use sarcasm to defend himself against his brother’s well-meaning tirades. He insists that he doesn’t want to be rich purely out of greed, but he totally does.

Ray Lang

Ray is the boys’ best friend and he might be something of a bad influence. He is obsessed with the military and with weaponry and is convinced he can take anyone in a fight. He is constantly talking himself into problems that the twins have to get him out of. He is actually a good kid at heart, he just happens to think that proving himself in battle is a sensible thing. He’s also really dumb, which may be related.

Mel Publicover

Mel is the Kane family’s neighbour. She’s a standup comic and a standup person. She helps Cleavon cope with this eclectic group of teenagers he’s found himself stuck with by making him laugh when he needs it most.

This is your standard family sitcom that would deal with “serious” issues now and then, but I like to think it’d be darker about it than usual. Imagine Very Special Episodes about not doing drugs or whatever, except instead of becoming a serious show for an episode, they keep up the comedy. That’s what I’d want. I’d give this show a couple years.

A human is in a science accident and finds himself teleported to the planet Hurch. Though the Hurchans have the technology to travel in space, Ben has no idea where in the universe Earth is, so his prospects of getting home are pretty grim. Luckily, some nice locals agree to let Ben live with them until a solution can be found. Comedy ensues.

Ben Nakamura

On Earth, things were not going Ben’s way. He was sure he was going to lose his funding if he didn’t start showing results on the science work he was doing, so he panicked and rushed it and messed up, only to find himself on the planet Hurch. In some ways, he liked Hurch a lot better than Earth, which makes sense considering it is a virtual paradise. Though he bumbles through his attempts to connect to the Hurchans, he is eager to impress them, because he doesn’t actually want to go home.

Leebo Deeb

Leebo is a fun-loving Hurchan who has volunteered to look after the human guest who appeared in his home one day. Though sarcastic and quick to mock Ben’s foibles, Leebo is extremely nice and already sees the stranger as his new best friend.

Nusterwold

Nusterwold is a stodgy civil servant who has finally found a purpose in life: making sure that the human doesn’t mess up Hurchan society. Most Hurchans are pretty happy that their world is a paradise, but Nusterwold always felt that some danger would make life more exciting, and then this human came along and with him came the possibility that something could go wrong. Now, with supreme diligence Nusterwold keeps watch over the human, preparing to punish any wrongdoing.

Shalekky

Shalekky is a scientist who wants nothing more than to research Ben and his alien world. Shalekky is apt to showing up uninvited and asking all sorts of questions. Ben actually doesn’t mind the attention and will offer things like hair or blood samples as enticement to get help from Shalekky, often helping distract Nusterwold.

Blipples

Blipples is the wacky neighbour.

What we have here is a situation I call, the Reverse Meego. In the standard Alien Comes To Earth sitcom, the idea is that the wacky alien figure, your Alf or your Mork or your Meego (Blessings Be Upon Him), comes to Earth and we get to see the outsider fail to act ways we consider normal. Maybe, in the end, it actually teaches us a little bit about ourselves. Ben From Planet Earth has a problem: the human audience would not know what to expect from the alien society any more than Ben would. I feel like this would be a frustrating show to watch. It might find an audience after it is cancelled, but it would definitely be cancelled.

And the Hurchans would totally be puppets.

At a special learning centre for supernaturally-powered children, called the School for Anomalies, Claire Lincoln teaches a class of students aged six to eight. They constantly get into amusing and strange scenarios.

Reggie Burbles

Reggie has the ability to see beyond the physical world. She can see ghosts and auras and other invisible stuff. She has no control over her powers, so she gets overwhelmed without her pair of special glasses to make things easier. She’s a bit nervous and shy and is the newest kid in the class.

Deshaun Carmichael

For some reason, not known to his perfectly normal parents, Deshaun is able to transform himself in demonic ways. He’s the class “brain” and is always eager to learn and volunteer himself for extra credit work. He has been the most welcoming to Reggie.

Tabitha Voight

Tabitha has the classic superhuman abilities. She’s nearly indestructible, superhumanly strong and fast, can jump clear across a football field, and is probably going to get stronger as she grows. She thinks of herself as the queen of the class. Most of her classmates don’t buy into it, but she can always boss around the younger kids.

Chalie Diamond

Charlie has somehow acquired the ability to transform his body into living diamond. It’s unclear how he gained this power, and it seems a coincidence that his surname is also Diamond, but he is actually one of the best kids in the class when it comes to using his powers. He’s bad at all the other school stuff, though, like reading and math.

Lizak

Lizak doesn’t actually have any supernatural powers that a Lizard Person doesn’t usually have, but in human society, being a Lizard Person is a supernatural power in itself. Liz was a bit of a handful for her adoptive human parents, so they opted to ship her out to the School for Anomalies. She became friends with Tabitha and seems content in her role as her sidekick. But is she?

Krug Harrison

The origins of Krug are not known to Krug, nor to his adoptive parents, nor to anyone else. This little monster just seems to have turned up one day. Though the humans who discovered him were loving enough to take him in and care for him, they realized their limitations and when they learned of the School for Anomalies they took the opportunity to send him there, in the hopes that someone would be able to help him out. As it stands, Krug is not doing great. He has problems with authority and enjoys picking on the kids he sees as weaker than him.

Alkazar Vela

Alkazar Vela, a cyborg wizard, is the founder of the School for Anomalies, and teaches the oldest class. He has a secret ulterior motive for founding his school: he wants to create an army of superhuman soldiers to help him take down his enemies. But he’s starting to get attached to his students (and the teachers who work for him), so will he come to regret turning the kids into soldiers?

Yeah, this one is more of my own self-interest in world building than an actual setup for a sitcom. The best I can spin it is that it might work as a parody of superhero shows.