In PHP I can name my array indices so that I may have something like:
$shows = Array(0 => Array(\'id\' => 1, \'name\' => \'Sesame Street\'),
This sounds like the PHP array using named indices is very similar to a python dict:
shows = [ {"id": 1, "name": "Sesaeme Street"}, {"id": 2, "name": "Dora The Explorer"}, ]
See http://docs.python.org/tutorial/datastructures.html#dictionaries for more on this.