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Couriers. Set it a thousand years in the future, and make one of the characters a surly robot.
crystal healing procedural where the joke is every patient dies at the end of the episode
Social workers: underpaid, overworked, too many cases to handle, and every week there's a new case to handle or an old one to revisit. There are different categories of Social Workers, but it'd be nice to cover a mix, so you dealt with elderly people with trouvle getting out, child adbuse/neglect, homelessness, and so on. If it was limited to one offiice, I'd pick mental health workers.
The various types of cases also lets you do a patient-of-the-week type format.
Sounds like it has the potential to be absolutely depressing, though.
A very depressing subject for sure, but a good lens to do meta-analysis of a number of failing social systems in the mold of The Wire. With the magic of screenwriting there could be a handful of good outcomes, moments of catharsis, and Hamsterdams while showing how fucked up everything is.
Air Traffic Controllers. These people are always living on a razor edge; they deal with some of the highest stakes work around, and every episode is some new crisis of communication. You can include the broader AirPort characters, like baggage handlers, security, and coffee shop workers, and it's ripe for spinoffs as you just take the formula and move it to new locations: ATC: Las Vegas would have a different vibe than ATC: NYC.
That's a good one, and considering all the reality TV slop about airports, I'm surprised it hasn't happened.
LMAO We were just watching a NATGEO thing about what happens to your luggage if it gets lost in an Airport.
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OSHA or local equivalent. No cop show portrays cop work realistically, might aswell just redshift the entire thing
Car mechanics. /r/justrolledintotheshop is so popular I would've thought it was a slam dunk.
I might catch hate for this, but winemakers are ripe for drama. Small-scale, young people trying to get by without selling their soul, aristocratic snobs who don't know what they're doing, big corporate villains trying to squeeze everyone else out. Add tourists and tour usual wine industry sickos and there's so many dysfunctional people.
there's a pretty good comedy-drama about a real event (w/ dramatic license) that happened in 1976. it's called Bottle Shock (2008). low budget, it failed at the box office and wasn't well received, but as someone who has been around viticulture, enology, and all the snobby that particular form of agriculture and booze-making invites, i thought it was very amusing.
Alan Rickman and Chris Pine are in it, with others.
Give me some scientist shit I want to watch a drama about rival mathematicians working on related theories trying to scoop each other
Faculty drama. Only one can get tenure! And maybe there's a romance subplot with a person from the physics department. Can they find love when their worlds are so different?
Oh hell yeah
Ok, I gave you a real one; now I'm going to give you an ironic one.
Switchroom is an information technology procedural following an IT department doing their daily work. It would have all the trappings of a cop procedural, serious tone, drawn out investigations, but for shit like "Ms. G has a ticket in saying her monitor is no longer working" and "The VP of sales clicked on a naughty web ad, and now the whole company is getting infected with a crypto locker". It will be required that NO ONE on the writing staff have any experience with computers at all.
The season finale involves a virus so bad they need to have two IT guys working on the computer at the same time to tackle it, one handles the mouse the other types with both hands.
That's a classic NCIS bit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kl6rsi7BEtk
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They made that show already it’s called CSI Cyber. S01 is fun to hate watch but S02 is just BAD bad.
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Communist guerrillas
No ironic answers
But real answer? Teachers
Abbot Elementary started strong but slid downwards.
That show had Office spinoff vibes, they were doing the whole "Mockumentary" thing, but then couldn't actually stick to the format at all. Shit like, two people talking in a hallway where one shot is from behind one of the actors and it cuts to another shot from behind another actor, in supposedly the same conversation, that should have the other camera guy in full view of the new perspective. They do the whole side eye look at the camera, thing, but with none of the "this is just a documentary" nuts and bolts consistancy.
I just started watching it and I like it. It's not groundbreaking, but I feel it does a decent job staying true to the setting.
Those who can't, Teachers
Two other shows that are teacher comedies and are ok
University admins
So villain protagonists?
constructio-...shit that's just Property Bros
sanitatio-...shit that's just Dirty Jobs
manufactur-...shit that's just How It's Made
uhhh uhhh....posting
Okay but id never say no to more how its made.
Dramatized how it's made? Hell yeah, let's get some telenovela producers to make manufacturing melodrama.
Thinking about it, the original Ugly Betty was set in a clothing factory, so why not.
fleet vehicle services garage for county/muncipal school buses.
i would watch it probably lol
That's very specific please elaborate.
like imagine a large automotive garage that services all the school buses (and probably the county fleet vehicles) for a small city and a number of adjacent counties. huge diesel engines with tens of thousands of operational hours and decades of service life. lots of specialized equipment and knowledge for such large equipment, administrative juggling routine maintenance schedules and accidents/emergency repairs, and oversized wreckers for picking up breakdowns, etc.
the "stories" would be diagnosing strange problems or ones that point to structural issues and commentary: underpaid operators, understaffed workforces, field trips, for profit outsourcing & privatization schemes/scams, technological upgrades/uncertainty (electrification), school consolidation/closure making transit/operational times increase, etc.
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Construction, specifically general contractors who run large sites. It's got all the shit boring TV likers crave!
Everyone is acting in their own self interest but acts like they're just trying to help.
Plenty of room for B and C plots with inter-trade drama
Main character will certainly be an addict. So will most of the other characters though.
Tons of needlessly complicated plans and rules to flash on screen when they're not being followed.
Also i get to be the star
Well the star would be a generically handsome white person in their late 20s/early 30s.
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Interwar carnival entertainers. Acrobats, people riding motorcycles around a circular wall, con artists running the ball in cup games, etc.
Social workers.
From the little I know of this line of work, it would be the most depressing show on television.
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I think the "Chicago universe" of Chicago PD, Chicago Fire, and Chicago Med needs another sibling.
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Ninja edit
I just saw this...
Hard mode: No ironic answers.
Oh, man. Probably for the best though. I don't know if I could have finished that joke with panache anyway.
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~~Sewer guys~~ Public works.
Like Parks and Rec but there's more riding on it, plus bigger and cooler vehicles, emergencies, time constraints.
It's basically ghostbusters, but instead of busting ghosts, you're busting car-size wads of "flushable" wipes that clogged up the city waste water system.
Return to COPS: the pioneer of the reality television format. But instead of doing ride-alongs with sadistic crew cut dog killers, we're riding out to a geyser of effluent, a pothole with an entire bus inside of it, and a strip of highway with a two foot river running across it while somebody tries to rake an underwater pile of leaves away from the storm drain. It still has a lot of footage captured running with a handheld camera for some reason, as if it were a video game with a run button that is always taped down.
The NTSB. Somewhat similar to a cop show, but you have people investigating a crash with a dozen or so completing groups trying to cover off liability. That's tons of space for intrigue (bribery, planted evidence, etc), great potential for detailed investigations, and you have a built-in ticking clock in the FDR being repaired and analyzed.
On an adjacent note, the Catholic church would make for a great show. Every Cardinal is a striver who has dedicated their life for a chance to be Pope, but if they admit that, their chances go out the window. These are people who have spent their lives climbing the ladder in one of the oldest and most controversial institutions in the world. Conclave did an amazing job of this, but a show could focus more on the drama outside of the conclave.
There's Mayday/Air Crash Investigation, but it's less drama and more documentary
Custodians
Oh that could be fun. Pitch me
Edit: Quis custodiet ipsos custodians?
The show follows the head custodian of a large institutional building that houses a daycare, social programming, good programs, etc. (community centre). Each episode follows an emergency that happens where nobody thinks the custodian can handle it (they always can). Lost children, safety emergency, leak and repair, for example. We get to meet members of the community, regulars at the community centre, and the cops are the bad guys when they show up.
B plot is the main character is going through a divorce and fighting for custody of their children.
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this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2025
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Here's a list of tons of leftist movies.
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