Two families living in a duplex have to put up with each other’s quirks.

Ming Doswell

Ming is a police officer from a line of police officers, and she deals with chaos so much in her job that she’d like to get some order in her home life. She will never actually achieve this.

Clinton Doswell

Clinton is a simple man, and likes it that way. He is a stay-at-home dad who does some odd jobs to make extra money, but the thing he is most concerned with is that his kids have a fun childhood. Because of this, he doesn’t put many restrictions on them.

May Doswell

May is the younger sister and she’s all about learning. She does her homework by choice and seeks out extra credit assignments and even tries to learn on her own. She’s also very nosy, and pries into other people’s business all the time.

Erica Doswell

The older of the girls, Erica is a trickster. She will do anything to get a laugh, including lying to other members of the family to see things go wrong.

Abner P. Ruiz

A professor of classic literature, Abner is convinced that the way to raise children well is by exposing them to the fancy-pantsiest of novels. This hasn’t worked with his son, or with his students, but he blames them, not the works.

Colleen Ruiz

Colleen Ruiz is a writer of dramatic plays and constantly tries to seek inspiration in her family life. She is not above “experimenting” on the kids in the families to see how they react to situations.

Thesaurus Ruiz

His idiotic intellectual parents named him Thesaurus because they thought that would make him good with words. It hasn’t. Thesaurus’s main love is sports, much to the embarrassment of his father.

The idea of a big cast of characters coming together is pure sitcom normalcy. All kinds of opposing or complimentary motivations could generate all sorts of story ideas here. There’s no real PDR-Style Twist to this premise though. Probably that would make the show more popular, though.

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.