Dollhouse

The recent news that The Shield creator Shawn Ryan is taking on showrunning duties over at Lie to Me next fall got us thinking that there are more than a few other series on the air that could benefit from a change behind the scenes. Here are ten other high-profile executive producers and the shows we’d love to see them take over.

1. J.J. Abrams, Dollhouse

Joss Whedon and J.J. Abrams are being compared a lot lately, and probably unfairly, but it still got us thinking — could J.J. improve Dollhouse? It’s certainly possible. After all, he’s great at the conspiracy theory thing, and creating characters whose loyalties and motivations are dubious, and if Dollhouse is going to have an overarching mythology that gets rolled out in weekly cliffhanger reveals like it has been, after Alias, Lost and Fringe, J.J. is the king of that. And it’s not like the fun, Whedonesque geeky references would go away — Hurley, Marshall Flinkman, Walter Bishop, anybody? It would probably be a tighter, more focused show. At least until he got bored two seasons in and up and quit, of course.

2. Rob Thomas, 90210

Since Cupid is basically dead... again, it’s time for Rob Thomas to return to the other show he was supposed to work on this past season. The 90210 redux could really use Thomas’ help to make these teenagers actually seem realistic. He could make bad boy Liam into an ass like Logan was for most of Veronica Mars, transform Silver from a wishy-washy blogger into a cool Mac-like nerd, and Annie into someone with an actual personality.

3. Mark Burnett, American Idol

Even though we’re happy with the final two results, this season has been a trainwreck with the overruns and the annoying Kara and the unnecessary wild card, but reality show king Mark Burnett could make it more exciting. Perhaps challenges between the contestants where the bottom three have to stand on teeny tiny posts, and whoever stays on the longest wins. Or they could have the bottom three fight for their lives Apprentice-style by arguing with their judges about who deserves to stick around.

4. Aaron Sorkin, The Office

Imagine Michael and Dwight pedeconferencing around the Dunder-Mifflin office in circles, picking up random characters as they all rapid-fire idealistic sentiments and literary/sports/historical/political references before dropping out of the parade and tagging someone else in, the lot of them taking breaks only for either some old-timey slapstick or melodramatic speeches about friendship, duty and loyalty. And they sell paper sometimes, but that’s not really the point, is it?

5. Joss Whedon, Castle

Castle’s got quippy dialogue, a sassy gal and Nathan Fillion. All things that Joss has plenty experience with. It may not be as lofty as what he attempted to do with Dollhouse, and it doesn’t have much to do with the supernatural, but it certainly has completely implausible cases. It’s like Angel with less vampires. Whedon could work with that.

6. Ron Moore, Smallville

We’d love to see Ron Moore tackle this twisted world. Lana could come back wearing skin-tight dresses and existing solely in Clark’s mind, Chloe could take up smoking cigars, drinking too much and punching people, and all fighting would either involve robots or guys in wife-beaters in a boxing ring. And if he really writes himself into a corner, he can either skip ahead a year to get to a more interesting part, or jump a million years into the future and completely ignore most of the mythology of the show.

7. Alan Ball, Heroes

Despite the rare exception, Heroes is boring. We keep watching it because we’re mentally unstable masochists, but that thing is X-Men gone white bread. Alan Ball would sex it up, crazy it up and add vampires. And then he’d give Peter a brain tumor and Angela a love life. Oh, would that it were so.

8. Marc Cherry, The Hills

We’ve given up any pretense that this reality show in any way, shape or form resembles anything real, so why not give in and just have a real writer take it over? At least then it might be more than just people staring at each other having boring conversations about nothing. Let’s put Marc Cherry on the case and The Hills girls will at least be more entertaining when they’re backstabbing each other.

9. Amy Sherman-Palladino, Gossip Girl

The problem with Gossip Girl is that, once the awe of everyone’s fabulous wardrobe subsides, Blair, Chuck, Dorota and sometimes Jenny are the only ones saying anything funny or interesting. Amy Sherman-Palladino was able to fully flesh out a fantastic cast of witty, youthful characters on Gilmore Girls, and she could fix the imbalance here. Plus, Blair is the only character who talks fast enough. They all need to be talking faster, preferably at Palladino-speed.

10. Shonda Rhimes, Ghost Whisperer

This show used to be a perfectly fine little series about a woman who helps ghosts cross over to the other side, but it got lost somewhere along the way, about when they decided to kill off their lead and then have him come back in someone else’s body (though we see him looking like he originally did). Shonda does good mushy romance, and she drove us crazy with the Dead Denny ghost sex over on Grey’s... maybe if she worked on this show she could get it all out of her system.