"Community" is alive for at least one more season, thanks to a last minute save by Yahoo, who picked up the show just as contracts for everyone involved were about to run out. And apparently those movie talks are already sort of happening. But one player who has been curiously silent about all of this is NBC, who basically decided that the cult show wasn’t worth keeping around, and canceled it this past spring. Well, this weekend, NBC Entertainment chairman Bob Greenblatt told the press assembled for the Television Critics Association why the network ultimately axed "Community."
"It didn’t just make sense for us to have another season of it at that level of audience," he explained, adding his doubts about whether the show will flourish online. “I don’t know if we we’ll ever know how many will watch it on on Yahoo, I guess we will, I’m curious if they’ll have a bigger audience with it than we did.”
And he wasn’t done there, with Greenblatt also distancing himself and NBC from the whole "six-seasons-and-movie" crusade, essentially implying it was never a reality. “That sixth season thing was created by them — I’m surprised they didn’t say ’10 seasons and a movie,’” he said. “And [the mantra started] before my time [at NBC]."
One gets the impression that the network really didn’t understand "Community," and that’s hardly a surprise considering how near the show came to being cancelled in previous seasons. Will Greenblatt and NBC be eating crow when "Community" returns this fall? We’ll soon see. [EW]
It's always more of a surprise to me that the show lasted as long as it did rather than it being cancelled early. NBC could have pretty justifiably axed it a long time ago based on the numbers, but with a show like Community I'm always curious if the buzz around it or the increased devotion of the fanbase really means something. Or how much Hulu views it got. Community was actually a case of NBC listening to fans more than many other shows because it did last as long as it did with ratings in the toilet.