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

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

― Fas Ro Duh (Gukbe), Friday, May 11, 2012 12:16 AM (9 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This is the way major labels treat bands now too, sadly

Yeah, the days of a Laurie Anderson getting a seven-album deal with a Warner Bros. are pretty much over.

From a business standpoint, it's often a sound decisions to order third and fourth and partial fifth seasons of a very middling, only moderately popular show /w cheap production costs (multicam, standing sets, low cost actors at launch) to get to the traditional 100 episode syndication watershed. Since a lot of shows run in the red until they're sold off/stripped/sent overseas, it's not that risky to expect that a long-running show w/ poor ratings to be given a final run of episodes that won't garner many viewers as 'new TV' but will position it for a longer cable or syndicated run.

yeah i don't know if america will ever get behind these shows in a major way, but shows that hit a niche are probably as likely to get a decent life somewhere on tv today (esp if the cougar town tbs shift works out) as they ever where.

i thought 30 Rock's overall ratings/cultural profile would raise after syndicated reruns started this past year, but if anything the opposite has happened.

a thousand points to the first web journalist to find a kid raised on 30 rock reruns who had no idea NBC was a real network

lol

Here are some differences though:
i) You can jump in and watch any episode of Seinfeld and understand it without needing the context of the rest of the series. This is not the case with at least this season of Community.
ii) The humour in Seinfeld does not generally rely on layered cultural references. You don't need to know a bunch of other things to get the jokes on Seinfeld. I often think that e.g. as much as I love "Abed's Uncontrollable Christmas", no one will find much of it funny in 20 years when Bjork, Tim Burton, and Lost are no longer current (or recent).

― EveningStar (Sund4r), Friday, May 11, 2012 12:27 AM (11 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

OTM, at its base, seinfeld was about really primal human stuff - vanity, hate, boredom, pettiness, etc

tbh i sometimes see early 30 Rocks on syndication and some of the references are already starting to become incomprehensible

For all I know, Bjork and Tim Burton will be taught in schools 20 years from now

like, yeah, there are alienating elements to these shows that make them less likely to achieve Wings-like ratings, but if these shows age like SCTV...I'm fine with that.

wings was p dope overall

i didn't mean to suggest wings wasn't mad fresh

church

i) You can jump in and watch any episode of Seinfeld and understand it without needing the context of the rest of the series. This is not the case with at least this season of Community.

I think Community is off-putting for new viewers, (Seinfeld probably was too--taking several episodes for viewers to figure out who you were supposed to be rooting for: no one) but it's not really any more of a serial comedy than most other sitcoms--certainly not like Parks and Rec with its season-long story arcs. What do you really need to know about the Community mythos to enjoy that Law & Order parody? These characters are wacky?

ooh a law and order parody i bet that was funney

dear community,

your arms are too short to box with god.

http://www.emcblue.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/law-nd-order-svu.jpg

Parks renewed for 13 episodes and slated for the fall, so a back 9 isn't out of the question. Up All Night also renewed. Not so much with the overhaul, then.

ughhhhh fuckin Up All Night

ParkandRec has been renewed for 22 episodes, not 13!

Whitney also renewed.

haha jesus christ

Outsourced aside, pretty much all the new comedies NBC has canceled in the past 2 years are far more tolerable than the ones that have been renewed

HAPPY ENDINGS will be back for a full season of 22 episodes.

^^^Important news not to be slept on^^^^

Yay for P&R, Up All Night and Happy Endings!

Hope that The Office really does go away, but it probably won't.

Parks renewed for 13 episodes and slated for the fall

Good news for Schur's proposed arc to have Ben working in D.C. through the first week of November.

glad for 'up all night' even though i've never watched it tbqf, a friend of mine is on that show.

more interested in watching 'parks and rec' or 'community' at some point.

are you friends with the baby

is the baby ur friend on up all night

Up All Night has the same general feel as Modern Family to me, except there are fewer characters to follow and it's (thank goodness) not shot documentary style.

I do not watch Modern Family regularly, though, so I don't have the same sort of attachment to any of its characters as I do Up All Night.

hooray for everyone!

max otm

Up All Night has the same general feel as Baby Blues comic strips to me

lovin this tv analysis

some dude, have you watched Up All Night at all since, say, December?

Really glad Parks & Rec got the full pickup. It's the least niche-y of the ones I watch, and I feel like it could really catch on with more people if, like, more people would watch the fuckin' thing. Plus this last season was so good. So yay. Also yay to Happy Endings, which I only really caught on to shortly before the season ended, so I have some catching up to do.

probably, but not much -- i made some effort to give it time to improve, but obv once it starts to feel like a conscious effort to 'keep up' it becomes kind of a lost cause to do so (xpost)

so community is on for a fourth season reduced?

yessssss, so glad parks and rec got the full 22!

yeah Community is confirmed for 13 eps (although the possibility appears to still exist of more episodes being added or it suriviving past next season, not a firm "13 and that's it" thing as previously speculated).

the onion article speculates it's essentially coming back as a "new" show, competing with the other new sitcoms for the back 9. oh yeah, and Dan Harmon might be stepping down as showrunner.

very happy about P&R. figured Happy Endings had a good shot at renewal

wtf gr80

dan tweeted that if he stepped down as showrunner, it wouldn't be just because chevy is dick. like that article reported. then again he didn't flat out say "no i'm not stepping down" so PANIC

ughhhhh fuckin Up All Night

― some dude

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpYhGdrknlA

lolololol

i tell markers what banks told me, go head switch ya style up

Amazing fact about NBC: Harry's Law, which they've just cancelled, was their most watched scripted show.

Wow. Yeah, that just about sums them up, all right.

i didn't even know that show existed until just now

That show was part of why they brought Spader in on The Office.