Ugh, this is so not streets ahead!
Community: Season 4 was set to premiere in about a week and a half, on Friday, October 19th. But The Hollywood Reporter reveals that NBC has made the rather late decision to hold off on debuting both Community and Whitney (which was slated to air before Community on Fridays) for a date to be determined.
The Reporter’s sources do say the reason is a positive one, allowing “for both series to receive an additional marketing push,” but it’s going to be a quick source of frustration for Community fans going into this season – which has already seen its share of raised eyebrows, to say the least. The biggest of course is the removal of series creator Dan Harmon from the series. But then there was the show only getting a thirteen episode pickup, its move to Fridays, and an October 19th date that was already later than almost any other fall debut.
Of course, as the Reporter notes, this isn’t the first time Community fans have had to wait longer than expected for new episodes – last year, the show received a midseason hiatus that took it off the air for a couple of months.
In the meantime, NBC will air repeats of Grimm in the 8pm-9pm timeslot, before new episodes of Grimm -- which has been performing relatively well for NBC on this difficult night -- air at 9pm.
Update: Hmm, this gets more interesting. Vulture has a statement from NBC on the delay. It reads:
“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."
Vulture also speculates that it’s looking very possible Whitney and Community won’t air on Fridays at all. NBC recently gave full season orders to new comedies Go On and The New Normal, but the future is much more uncertain for Animal Practice, and, Vulture suggests, Whitney could possibly be paired with Guys on Kids on Wednesdays instead, putting NBC’s only two multicamera sitcoms together. Vulture also wonders if NBC might simply put Community back on Thursdays and while they suggest it could substitute for Up All Night, I wonder if another possibility is that it could debut on Thursdays midseason, after 30 Rock finishes its own thirteen episode season – which is officially its last.
The silver lining here is that Vulture does also believe that NBC did indeed decide to delay Community and Whitney’s returns because they’d put so much promotional money and time into their new fall series, they didn’t want to so quietly and weakly have a new Friday comedy lineup debut without proper promotion. Fans felt Community (and, okay, Whitney, if you’re a fan of that) were being dumped aside on Fridays in the first place, but it looks like NBC has indeed re-thought that idea…
Source : ign[dot]com
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