7

Miriam Webster's Dictionary

The show revolves around the trendsetting blogger Miriam Webster and her cleverly named blog, Miriam Webster's Dictionary, where she highlights and sometimes invents new slang words that annoyingly trendy people might use, like "frenemy," "frenefits," "friendsetter," "friendoscopy" ... basically words that make you want to hit someone when they use them.

Every episode begins and ends with Miriam blogging about the word of the week, kind of like Stephen Colbert's "The Word" feature, except without any subtlety, because people who watch a show about a fashionable blogger think subtlety is a bunch of English words on the bottom of a screen when characters are speaking a foreign language.

A subtlety.

In the course of each episode, Miriam gets into hilarious hijinks and learns a valuable lesson about life or something that she blogs about in the closing scene, similar to Grey's Anatomy's ending voice-overs or the ending journal entries in the more realistic medical drama Doogie Howser, M.D.

6

The Chicago Manual of Style

Envious of the success of fashion-obsessed shows like Sex in the City? Beaten to the punch at purchasing the TV rights to the popular The Devil Wears Prada book/movie brand? No problem!

The TV rights to the Chicago Manual of Style can probably be had for a pittance, probably because it is not a saucy tale of high fashion but a language guide for proper citation and writing styles. You have all the benefits of most people vaguely thinking it sounds familiar and none of the drawbacks of those people knowing exactly what it is.

Kaylee, Madison and Mackenzie are three confident career women who can identify different makeup products and know the difference between Jimmy Choo and Manolo Blahnik. Someone else is going to have to write that part or else I am going to have one character tell another she wears too much mascara on her lips or something.

Too much?

5

Strunk & White

Odd couple cop/detective buddy shows named Something & Something have been popular forever, with such classics as Starsky & Hutch, Simon & Simon, Cagney & Lacey, Jake and the Fatman, Rizzoli & Isles and of course Law & Order, featuring the unforgettable characters of uptight, by-the-book Johnny Law and his spontaneous, free-spirited partner, Jessica Order.

In Strunk & White (based on the popular nickname for the authoritative grammar reference book The Elements of Style, by Strunk & White), buttoned-up grammarian Margaret Strunk faints at the sight of a dangling participle while her easygoing partner Torrey White sees English as "an evolving language" and launches social media campaigns to include the word "bromance" in the next version of the Oxford English Dictionary.

They hunt down criminals by identifying unique grammar and misspelling patterns. "Notice the use of 'should of' and 'bare with me' in both the first and the second ransom note."

Thanks to Strix.org.uk's ransom note generator.

4

Poor Richard's Almanack

Richard Franklin can't catch a break. It rained on his wedding day, he always runs into traffic jams when he's late, every time he wants to find a knife he finds about ten thousand spoons and Alanis Morissette stole the potential hit song he wrote about his life and completely mistitled it. His terrible fortune also leads to him losing his job and his life savings in the pilot episode, causing the show's title to work on multiple levels (two).

Despite being homeless and continuing on his way to rock bottom, Poor Richard turns out to be a fount of wisdom -- the catch being that his wisdom only benefits others, and not himself. When he suggests that "a penny saved is a penny earned," his friend Penny puts her monthly lottery fund into a savings account and is soon able to buy a house. Meanwhile, Richard finds a penny on the street and catches hepatitis from it somehow.

Saying "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure," he advises his brother Donny to swallow his pride and see a doctor before his symptoms worsen, and a test catches a lurking tumor just in time. Meanwhile, Richard takes his own advice and begins practicing safer sex. Unfortunately, the discount condoms he purchased were made in China, where they were ironically contaminated with syphilis.

Also, most of Richard's misfortunes seem to fall upon his genitals, causing the title to work on three levels.

3

Encyclopedia Britannica

2

DSM: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual

Piggybacking on the popularity of both the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the authoritative psychology reference book, and CSI, the formulaic, brain-cell-destroying crime show, DSM is a crime procedural about an elite team of police psychologists.

1

Rand McNally's Atlas of the World

"Walker, Texas Ranger meets Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?" is not a phrase you hear very often, and it's time for that to change.

This show centers around good ol' boy Rand McNally, a highly respected sheriff who specializes in doling out a fistful of justice. When Sheriff McNally's daughter embarrasses the family at a beauty pageant by failing to find the U.S. on a map, he realizes it's time for some drastic geography education.

Accepting a position as a goodwill ambassador for U.S. law enforcement, McNally takes his daughter Bree from country to country, where she learns that there's no such language as "Mexican" while he punches his way through bloodthirsty cartels, or she discovers that Africa is actually made of multiple countries while her father delivers the left hook of justice to a corrupt warlord.

With a perfect mixture of punching and education, Rand McNally's Atlas of the World is sure to appeal to the punching man who wants his kids to know something about other cultures.

For more from Christina, check out 7 Things From America That Are Insanely Popular Overseas and A History of Pop Culture's Obsession with Human/Cat Hybrids.