No - they were writing a specific show. I mean writers trying to… oh never mind. 
I did come up with ideas for first several episodes. I doubt that cases are more original than those shown in an original CSI, but I would like to know what you guys think.
Episode 1
Case 1: Two friends are hiking together, but relaxing hiking trip turns into a nightmare after a masked gunman shots the girl and wounds the boy. Who would do such a thing and how is that linked to an accidental death of a well known criminal-that may not be accidental at all?
Case 2: A young man on a date with his new girlfriend goes to use the bathroom and never returns: somebody followed him inside and stabbed him to death. But who?
Episode 2
Case 1: A teenage boy is found dead in his neighbour’s yard, next to a swimming pool, bludgeoned to death. Victim, his neighbour, claims that she was swimming in the familie’s swimming pool late at night and that he attacked her when she went to get dressed, trying to rape her, leaving her no choice but to kill him in self defense. However, some of the evidence doesn’t add up, making the self defense story very unlikely. The case turns out to be even more complicated when a rookie police officer who was originally called to a scene dies on that crime scene-apparently in a tragic accident.
Case 2: A woman was raped and beaten, then simply left on an abandoned field near the highway. She has no recollection of the crime and the attacker did his best not to leave any evidence, so our team needs to do their best to catch him.
Episode 3
Case 1: Three people were apparently murdered in a local High school overnight: body of a teenage girl found stuffed in a locker belonging to a student with a bad reputation (she was shot to death); gym teacher found bludgeoned to death in a gym; and a young unidentified woman found stabbed to death in the school’s garden, gun found on the ground near her body. What happened there that night? Are the deaths connected?
Case 2: In 1988, serial killer serving five consecutive life sentences in a federal prison was stabbed the death. The case was never solved. Now, almost thirty years later, our team needs to reopen the case and find a killer after a new DNA evidence is found.
Here’s a wonderful idea that I’d actually really like to see: College 101. One of the big online colleges (University of Phoenix) could sponsor it and it would just be a college accredited course worth credits that would also include graded homework and tests. I think the idea of a well-produced series based on a college course would be fascinating and entertaining. Plus, it would give good publicity to a college and really ramp up their enrollment.
I think Love Rhombus was referring to an episode of “Fringe” (but I could be wrong)
Lassie’s Rescue Rangers
Do it all in Dog Talk*, tho. With closed captions for us Americans.
*ruff, bark, arf, growl, snarl, drool…
Here’s something that certainly hasn’t been done:
Ace McAwesome and his team of talented do-gooders pick a business each week and protect it from shoplifters, employee theft, spurious lawsuits, and unions.
“Home Movies” - not clips, like Funniest Home Videos. I mean start-to-finish home movies of birthday parties or vacations or little league games or dance recitals or gym meets or weddings or class plays. People take hours and hours of videos and no one ever watches them. Now the whole world can watch! 
A Very Special After School ABC Special: Adam and Steve Meet Godzilla
A May/December gay romance highlighting an awareness of endangered super lizards.
Ooh! I like this!
But do it as a comedy like Barney Miller or Night Court because there’s going to be tons of people and funny bits of stories going through an airport. Intersperse with some real drama or sober concerns, particularly if it’s an international airport.
(stay off the romance of Love Boat or Hotel; while there’s a lot of romantic reunions occurring at airports, most of the drama of such relationships is off-site (or we’re dealing with porn in the restrooms, and that’s not TV-oriented).
–G!
They’ve made it. It was cancelled:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heist_(TV_series)
When I read this, I thought to myself, “Haha, he’s pitching Burn Notice as if it had never aired.” Then I checked the date on his post.
Hmm…Jet Li’s The ONE
(Not very good, even for Jet Li fans)
—G.
A prequel to Barney Miller. We could call it How I Met Yamana.
Does it have to be a good idea?
Take boring, pointless people in mundane lives and put a reality show around them. Like, one guy would be a gamer, and for 6 hours of the day, he’d stare at a screen and click his mouse without talking to anyone. Have the show be about how normal people spend their lives. Another character could be a retired couple who sleep for most of the day and have no kids and no drama.
Or, here’s a novel idea, have an actual reality show with NO scripted moments, no parts that producers insert for drama, and no creative editing to mislead viewers. I got tired of that crap after watching Heroes of Cosplay and that made up drama infesting that show. I just wanted to watch a show about making costumes and hard working fans having fun at conventions. And Yaya’s cleavage.
Now that every show can be watched online in many different versions, I wonder if some reality show will ever be made in two versions… the “normal” version and the “raw boring footage” version.
Big Brother sells the “live feed” of the whole season. There are websites dedicated to chronicling everything that happens on that live feed too.
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“My Two Moms.” An ordinary sitcom with two mothers, co-parents in a lesbian relationship. Nothing groundbreaking about that except the two mums as central characters, which I don’t think has actually been done before. awaits link refuting this Having the two parents both be female would change things a little, just enough to make it different, but it would also mostly be about normal family stuff.
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“Home.” A show about living on a terraformed planet so far from Earth that there’s no contact with Earth beyond the DVDs they constantly watch (the adults like Friends and The Big Bang Theory and the kids are very confused by Sesame Street, thinking that Big Bird was real), and the fact that the progenitors were in stasis when they left 21st-century Earth so act like our compatriats would do, with all their morals and norms.
The terraforming has not gone particularly well and people actually die now and then, but there is hope for the future. There are no emergency food drops and there never will be. For all they know, everyone on Earth is dead. Life is hard. Crops fail or thrive in unexpected ways - some good, some bad. The kids always wonder why their parents left Earth and sometimes their parents do too, but there’s no going back.
Most of the people on the ship were scientists, farmers, people who’d be expected to do well in such an environment, but for a wildcard you could throw in a stowaway and his/her kid. They shouldn’t be unexpectedly and unrealistically more capable than all the people chosen for their capabilities, though; they’re just there to provide an audience surrogate. And they always they know that they’re the most expendable.
In the near future, Russia-or-China-or-India has 100 nuclear weapons stolen from a stockpile, which are sold on the international black market. A few months later one of them goes off in an American city, killing hundreds of thousands of people and causing billions of dollars of economic loss. In response, a constitutional amendment is passed allowing the Supreme Court to issue special warrants that bypass the Bill of Rights.
The show revolves around an ultra-elite agent of a newly-formed task force charged with preventing nuclear terrorism (sort of like True Lies). This agent is one of only five people in the United States entrusted to be issued the Supreme Court’s carte-blanche warrants, and who report directly to the President of the United States. Every week we see him tracking down leads to the whereabouts of the other 99 nukes, and balancing the ethical dilemmas of being the ultimate bad-boy cop.
I picture one scene from the pilot episode. Our Hero is grilling some suspicious character who keeps squealing about “you can’t do this to me” and finally our hero shows him a copy of the SCOTUS warrant and says: “You see this? This is a warrant signed by the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court. It means you have no rights I don’t want to give you. It means that if I think that doing so will prevent the detonation of a nuclear weapon on American soil, I can strap you to a table and give you an icepick lobotomy!”
UUURRRGH!! That’s “True Lies”, not “Total Recall”