R.I.P. 30 ROCK R.I.P COMMUNITY R.I.P. PARKS & REC

what have you abandoned?

the desire to try anything

Article mentions a show called "Hannibal" that I have never heard of. Instead of looking up what it actually is I am just going to imagine that it is a show starring Hannibal Burress walking around Chicago doing something awesome.

There is precedent for wheel shows (as they're called). In the 1970s, NBC ran the "NBC Mystery Movie" and spun off Columbo, McCloud, and McMillan & Wife from it into their own successful series. They could easily do a "NBC Weekly Comedy" for new shows and just spin-off what sticks with people.

I wish they'd do this.

I was agitating for a similar thing on the 30 Rock thread the other day. If a broadcast network were to go for it it'd be NBC.

I wound up watching a bit of Community tonight and I just don't get it. Not funny, not funny at all.

Hmm, that's surprising, because I've found it funnier when it's on the verge of cancellation.

mook: sitcoms is the relevant one

Article mentions a show called "Hannibal" that I have never heard of. Instead of looking up what it actually is I am just going to imagine that it is a show starring Hannibal Burress walking around Chicago doing something awesome.

As much as that would be awesome, it's another attempt to cash in on the Hannibal Lecter character.

i laughed pretty hard at community tnite

the 'weekly comedy' idea is basically the Channel 101/Acceptable TV model that the creative core of Community started out with

so like I don't really keep up w/ network tv politics but why all the schadefreude upthread at NBC's inevitable demise? i mean NBC is literally (literally!!) the only network television I watch! shame about these shows; I still dig 30 Rock and def love P&R (community I haven't really watched on the reg since s1... But glad its there etc)

You can't really just dip into these shows like you can Everybody Loves Raymond or something. That's part of why I like them, but that's also a part of why they're hurting for ratings.

The schadenfreude is due to NBC's tendency towards failing to see or appreciate when they have something good going for them and also their tendency to shoot themselves in the foot with some regularity. The people in charge have displayed a level of ineptness with both the creative and business end of running a network and they should probably not be running a network. It's like if some arrogant blowhard who didn't give a shit about food opened a restaurant and slowly ran it into the ground: there's a level of entertainment in watching the restaurant fail even if you enjoy some of the food.

(And I also love these shows, but for me, there's always been a sense of dreadful inevitability underlying that love. The NBC of today is never gonna nurture another Cheers/Seinfeld/Cosby Show into long-term existence.)

tbf nothing is ever gonna be like the Cosby Show, ever again

the *television* of today isn't going to nurture that

not in terms of creative genius or w/e I was 3 when that went off the air, but no primetime sitcom is ever gonna get 30 million households ever again selfxps

xpost

I don't think that's necessarily true. Maybe in terms of the level of viewership, but you could definitely nurture a show to the point of its becoming a long-running staple of your schedule. Other networks have their long-running staple sitcoms. I get the feeling NBC abandons shit because it doesn't get Cosby-era ratings, but nothing can in this day and age.

cosby show didn't remotely need to be nurtured into long term existence, show was #1 rated show EVERY WEEK it was on until roseanne premiered and gave it serious competition and later fox scheduling simpsons against it cut into its numbers (and made cheers #1). cheers famously was the lowest rated show on tv it's first (best) season and wasn't an actual smash until cosby premiered, seinfeld famously struggled for years.

balls bringing science

also i don't think nbc is imagining it can hit cosby era numbers, i imagine they're hoping/demanding they can get better or at least comparable numbers to pawn stars or maybe even jersey shore. on thursdays, the most valuable night of a network schedule.

I wound up watching a bit of Community tonight and I just don't get it. Not funny, not funny at all.

I hate to be that guy, but tonight's episode really did require a lot of familiarity with the Community world beforehand to make it work.

it's sorta weird that now w/ tv critics like sepinwall/seitz/avclub so much more prominent than tv critics were before (i'm not any of them approach the power shales had/has?, sepinwall probably, but shales was more a variety type critic w/ a dose of nikki finke tossed in than something like sepinwall plus i'm not sure many ppl ie viewers really read shales outside of dc/ny/la, i can't think of a show shales 'made' for example) that they're also less relevant or powerful. see also, and more importantly i'd guess, the diminished power of the emmys or the cover of tv guide.

wasn't 'community' only supposed to last four seasons anyway? having the same 6-7 characters stay in community college for longer than that seems like a stretch.

Yeah, I'm among the bigger Community stans but a four-season arc seems like it would be perfect to me. Imo, most sitcoms fade when they outlive their initial premise.

Btw, I totally used the "Alfie and Abner" 'flashback' from 30 Rock in class today when talking about minstrel-era stereotypes.

(People laughed but fwiw, not one student made even a sign of recognition when I asked if anyone watched 30 Rock. A bad sign, no doubt.)

lagoon otm

So NBC's entire slate of long-running sitcoms is broadcast on Thursday nights. The Office is currently their longest-running sitcom at eight seasons, and the wheels have arguably been coming off of that thing for a couple of seasons now (and they almost definitely will if they completely recast, as has been suggested). 30 Rock is next in line with six seasons and they're shuttering that one for sure. Parks & Recreation and Community are at four and three seasons, respectively and (Community's upcoming Comedy Central reruns aside) neither is anywhere near the magic 100-episode marker necessary to send them into syndication. Literally every other sitcom they air started this season.

If you compare the state of sitcom affairs at NBC to ABC (whose Wednesday night line-up is young but seems safely entrenched for the foreseeable future) and CBS (with some of the longest-running trad sitcoms currently on air, including How I Met Your Mother which was renewed for an 8th and 9th season earlier this year) and Fox (which at the very least has their well-entrenched animation block), you'll get a sense of what I mean when I say that NBC doesn't display any desire to nurture their sitcoms long enough for them to become A Thing. And they're picking at the seams of Thursday night just when it had started cohering into a block of shows that made sense together and had a solid (if small) fanbase. And yeah, I know the networks' schedules are composed of more than just sitcoms, but NBC doesn't really have a whole lot going for it across the board at the moment.

tbf shows that don't become A Thing by the end of their 3rd season almost certainly never will

i'm almost disappointed NBC didn't actually announce the slow screwing of the sickly pooch.

The Office is going to keep Pam, Jim, and Andy at least.

I think it's ridiculous to say that NBC hasn't nurtured its comedy programming. It has desperately tried to make them work, and the ratings for any of their comedies save The Office would have seem them cancelled on any other network. ABC's sitcom offerings weren't that successful (or solid) until Modern Family came along. They were picking up Scrubs for a season as they transitioned away from multi-cams and weren't doing a very good job of it. Likewise with Fox - Sunday animation block aside they've struggled to get anything significant off the ground, save New Girl this season. I think NBC was hoping to find a huge hit, but if they couldn't, they'd stock their Thursday night with edgy, more youth-oriented shows but it just hasn't worked. I don't want to see Community or Parks and Rec go, but they've had a hell of a good run of it considering the ratings.

Arguably, though, the only thing that has saved these shows this long has been the utter failure of everything else on their schedule. A few seasons of The Biggest Loser and now The Voice is all they've managed to produce that can even compete with anyone else for years. Thursday is the biggest night of TV of the week money-wise, and they've got to sort it out.

I think the days of a sitcom like Seinfeld finally finding its audience three seasons in are over.

office won't be entirely recast, ed helms, jim and pam are all signed to come back. cbs canceled shit my dad says after one year when it had higher ratings than the office ever had nevermind 30 rock, etc. 100 episode marks isn't what it used to be re: syndication but parks and community will both be in the 80s by the end(?) of next season, comparable to the number of episodes sex and the city got, less than taxi, more than arrested development. himym nearly got canceled after it's second (best) season, when it had higher ratings than every nbc thursday show (and it was on monday), it became an actual big hit during it's third (maybe fourth) season, one of the actual occasions where stunt casting paid off (for occasions where it didn't see 30 rock, season 3). abc, cbs, and esp fox (which has generally struggled w/ live action sitcoms anyway)(eg arrested development) have all canceled many many sitcoms during the time nbc has nurtured (for lack of better options) community and parks. when nbc gave chuck 5 seasons despite horrible ratings because it had a solid if small fanbase and sepinwall liked it it was a sign of incredibly dysfunctional management, not a sign of a nurturing environment taking the longview a la tartikoff or whatever. nbc has had deep, entrenched problems for a long time, they have new ownership and new management and they're doing what new ownership and new management does in almost any other business scenario - they're blowing it up and rebuilding. that we're getting what we're getting of community and parks is a nice bonus (anyone who actually watched arrested development or freaks knows the end is usually nowhere near this graceful, it's usually a burnoff on a saturday night - last episodes of ad - or months later popping up on abc family channel - last episodes of f&g) and probably due to nbc still having few options and wanting to milk farewell tours out of 30 rock and (probably) the office.

I mean, my obvious sentimentalism towards the sitcom as a format may not even have a place in this conversation. The job of these suits is to sell ad space, and if they're not doing that effectively with their sitcoms, they may just wind up (somewhat justifiably) saying "fuck a sitcom".

if an actual hit boosts ratings for thursdays on the whole either or both shows could be kept around for another after this, but either way, both Community & P&R are getting a solid run.

Still...the earlier rumor was just so beautifully Qwikster-ish. AH well.

Freaks and Geeks got the Saturday burnoff too, although perhaps not in all markets.

i mean compared to terriers i'm nowhere near as heartbroken or angry about the end of community/parks (and i caught terriers on netflix so i'm part of the problem). the show i'm holding my breath for renewal on is happy endings, which i like at least as much as community (tbh more this season) or parks and unlike those shows (esp community) i could see actually turning into a big hit (though if it didn't happen by now, and w/ a post-modern family slot...). what ppl who like 'quality' tv should dread really isn't nbc moving away from single camera shows w/ prominent writers, they should worry about cable figuring out that the path to relevancy/mattering isn't necessarily 'quality' it might be genre stuff that networks won't touch w/ the tits/gore they can't touch. if/when the 'golden era' of tv ends it's gonna be because hbo, amc (where this has probably already happened), showtime, and whoever wants to be the next hbo/amc/etc are more interested in creating the next walking dead/true blood than the next mad men/the wire, esp since the latter is much much harder to pull off (see treme or even luck).

deric the network sitcom and the network drama have died more deaths over the past 30 years than snl. neither is going anywhere, even w/ reality tv clearly here to stay.

i mean i know everyone on ilx hates girls cuz it's filled w/ white ppl and what's worse they're women and what's worse still it appears they went to college but if you want this weird era of smart tv to keep going you better root for that thing to succeed, the idea that young tumblr whites have more desirable eyeballs than old whites who post on chain restaurants facebook pages and the concept of 'buzz' have sustained a huge proportion of the good, interesting, or smart popular art in this country.

as much as i hate these shows ending, balls is totally right about NBC - from a business standpoint they've kept all these shows around much longer then that probably should have. the notable exception being 30 Rock which had a slight bump during that whole Palin thing

happy endings is another show i love but it's firmly in the 30 Rock/Community mold where it's just too damn fast and weird to ever be a big hit, and doesn't have that gooey sentimental center helps something like HIMYM break out

man, terriers... yeah, FX should've backed that one, but the ratings were abysmal iirc. but, geez, how seasons did Rescue Me eventually get?

sitcoms will come and go but it's not a coincidence that almost all my favorite sitcoms are on NBC now, and i am worried that after their failure is complete we'll all lose out on this style... i don't think cable networks have the money/staff to really do these kinds of manic balls-to-the-walls nerdy sitcoms, at best they're clever and low-budget like Sunny

p.s. fuck chuck lorre

What made The Simpsons so popular?

(I personally enjoy these three shows more than The Simpsons - especially after the 90s - but it seems like a reasonable point of comparison.)

Scrubs wasn't as intellectual imo but it did have the manic bizarro thing - no less than Happy Endings for sure - and it became a success. Maybe the whole long-game love story was the trick there?

as intellectual

as 30 Rock or Community. I don't really see Happy Endings as an especially intellectual comedy although I do like it.

Don't forget that Scrubs used to run after a little show called Friends.

Scrubs was pretty weird, like NBC kept trying to kill it, then changed its mind over and over again before dumping it to ABC. Zach Braff becoming popular for a minute probably helped it for a season or two, much like the whole Tina Fey/Palin moment. The ratings were never THAT great, though, just solid... good for NBC, though?

I think The Simpsons had really good timing, as it'd been a really long time since a prime-time cartoon had been big, and they broke out after the peak of that whole TGIF/super wholesome family sitcom era of TV, and started/rode the wave of generally more snarky 90s TV

Yeah, Happy Endings is one of my favorites, but there's rarely any kind of second-layer to those jokes.

Yeah - Happy Endings is smart and quick, for sure, but its a show which has limited boundaries and sticks well within them.

simpsons was on a network that had had one 'hit' to that point (married w/ children) and was looking to establish a brand that simpsons played into, was like nothing that had ever been on tv before, and was incredibly well written and funny and vaguely dangerous initially. also: merchandising. in fact, ppl forget this, the merchandising predated the show somewhat (though, like dave matthews take on 'all along the watchtower', it took it to a whole nother level after the show premiered), the tracey ullman sketches had done well enough that i can remember talking to other kids on the school bus about looking forward to the simpsons getting their own show, and i can remember camelot records and tapes had a bart simpson 'underachiever and proud of it' poster i almost got before opting for a beasties one instead. what's weird w/ the simpsons is that the actual creative peak of the show is probably after it's mass phenom popularity peak - those first two seasons feel somewhat odd but THAT's the simpsons that inspired black bart t-shirts, george bush jeremiads, etc.