Despite a possible silver-lining, the cold hard truth is that the fourth season of Community will not be premiering next Friday night as originally planned. Oh, and there's the chilly soft truth that Whitney won't be back for its second season on October 19 either. Why aren't the comedies coming back as scheduled? And what's the possible silver lining? Well, there's no better place to turn than the peacock's mouth before speculating too much about the possibilities for Community and Whitney. NBC issued the following statement regarding the recent developments in their no-longer scheduled programs:
Given the success we’ve had for the past four weeks – including winning the first week of the season in A18-49 – we’ve decided to continue to concentrate our promotional strength on our new NBC shows that are scheduled Monday through Wednesday and have therefore decided to hold Community and Whitney from their previously announced premieres of October 19th. Without having to launch these comedies on Friday at this time, we can keep our promotion focused on earlier in the week -- plus we will have both comedies in our back pocket if we need to make any schedule changes on those nights. When we have a better idea of viewing patterns in the next few weeks, we will announce new season premieres of Whitney and Community.
Because NBC is doing surprisingly well--something no one was betting on since NBC hasn't won the first week in that demo for almost ten years--the network doesn't want to waste precious marketing time and money on the returning series. At this point, Community has to be pretty high on the TV shows getting jerked around by their own network list but, like I mentioned, something good may come of the delay. Perhaps, this will even mean a move away from Friday (death) night and back to the middle of the week.
Even though being in the network's 'back pocket' sounds incredibly dismissive, NBC's announcement has caused a fair share of positive speculation about Community's situation. And Whitney's. Of course, for these comedies to move back to Wednesday or Thursday (Tuesday seems unlikely with the success of the new series paired with Parenthood) something has to go, and the names bandying about at the moment are Wednesday's under-performing freshmen comedies Animal Practice and Guys With Kids, as well as Thursday's struggling sophomore Up All Night. Well, to be fair, all of Thursday on NBC is struggling.
As much as I'd like to see Community not air on Fridays, I was pretty excited for Season 4 to start next week. It feels a little like fans have been left holding a giant cookie wand. What do you think about the news? And on what night and/or with what other show would you like to see the delayed NBC comedies air?
