Just 11 days before its new season was set to premiere, Community has been indefinitely held back by NBC (as has Whitney, but who cares). This certainly doesn’t make NBC look much better in the wake of the debacle around its firing of the show’s creator, head writer, and runner, Dan Harmon, which earned the network endless ire from the series’s devoted fanbase (including myself).
NBC has released this statement:
“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. “
Being unable to understand Studio Doublespeak, I can’t really suss out whether one could read a non-claptrap explanation for the move out of this. Todd VanDerWerff at A.V. Club has some pretty good speculation about possible reasons behind the move, and what it could signal for the near future of the show and the network. He knows more about this than I do, and thus can offer more than my dejected sobbing.
