Everyone, deep down, thinks that their life would make a brilliant sitcom. Taxi drivers do. Hairdressers do.
Even I do, and I spend my entire life in a tiny room, stripped of all human contact, glumly tapping at a piece of failing machinery with my fingers until I fall asleep in my clothes.
And we're all wrong. Our lives would make terrible sitcoms.
The only people who could ever successfully adapt their lives into a sitcom are either so relentlessly wacky that they will one day end up permanently alienating everyone they have ever loved, or rich enough to bend the world to meet their every demand.
There's going to be a sitcom based on Justin Bieber's life. I don't know which of these categories he falls into.
According to reports, ABC is developing a single-camera sitcom based around the pre-fame life of the Canadian teen megastar. The project was first mooted last year, but now the network apparently has it under consideration for next season.
At this stage, it's probably best that you don't write this off as merely another doomed celebrity project, like the tragically abandoned Gordon Ramsay claymation series. The show is being executive produced by Bieber's manager Scooter Braun, who also manages Korean pop star Psy.
If Braun can convince everyone from Hugh Jackman to Ban Ki-moon to pose for photos doing the Gangnam Style dance, he essentially has the power to do anything he likes.
At this point we can only speculate on what the Bieber sitcom will be like. Sadly, because it will focus on his early years, it seems unlikely that Bieber will star as himself. This is a shame because, as anyone who watched him on Punk'd or that 10-minute remix of him dying on CSI knows, Bieber can project plenty of onscreen charisma when he wants to.
Instead, we should probably look forward to something along the lines of Everybody Hates Chris, the sitcom that dealt with Chris Rock's upbringing in Brooklyn in the 1980s. Although it hasn't been on TV for three years, Everybody Hates Chris had a sweetness to it, and a sense of nostalgia that never felt overdone.
When the Bieber sitcom becomes reality, everyone involved should sit down with the Everybody Hates Chris boxset and make plenty of notes.
Then again, it's being written by a couple of Entourage stalwarts – and you can almost guarantee that the word "Entourage" was used hundreds of times in the initial pitch – so there's every chance that we're in for all manner of badly observed, low-stakes storylines that the producers think they can get away with because everyone is so pretty and cool. And we need not worry about nostalgia either, because Bieber is still only about eight years old.
Perhaps the Bieber sitcom will surprise everyone by being well put together, although even that wouldn't be terribly encouraging. If it takes off, we're all but ensured a raft of similar projects by everyone from One Direction to Carly Rae Jepsen, and that might be too much to take.
It would be American Idol: From Justin to Kelly all over again, but repeated several times every week for the rest of our lives. This is a future that nobody can legitimately want.
We'll just have to wait and see what Bieber's sitcom will be like. If you're a fan of watching Canadian kids uploading endless videos to YouTube, you'll probably find something to enjoy. If you're a fan of watching Canadian kids learning what Germany is, then it might not be worth getting your hopes up too much.
This article originally appeared on guardian.co.uk
