Hip! Hip!.. Hopefully, you added, “Hooray” because it’s time to celebrate. Community will be renewed for a fourth season. The order will be for 13 episodes; however, there will be an option for NBC to pick-up the back nine, depending on how the show is doing. This puts the show in an interesting but not particularly relaxing situation. The good news is the show is coming back and people at NBC aren’t referring to it as its final season. The bad news is the show’s fate is still not completely certain. Another wrinkle is that 13 more episodes puts them at 84 total episodes, four shy of the industry standard 88 episodes needed for syndication. Maybe, NBC will love these short orders so much so that they’ll completely shift the broadcast paradigm and start giving all its shows 13 episodes a year, like cable. Six seasons and a movie is still six seasons and a movie, regardless of how short some of those seasons are.
No word on Parks & Recreation, The Office, Up All Night, and Whitney but things are looking promising, especially because NBC is saving all types of money with these shortened seasons.
Over at ABC, Modern Family got renewed, which caused all of Hollywood to shrug in non-amazement. The Middle and Suburgatory also will be back, the latter with Whoopi Goldberg as a talking dog (the part she and her hair have been training for for years). Most importantly, no word on Happy Endings but Vulture’s Joe Adalian Tweeted that ABC is just “hammering out the deal” at this point. So check back for that celebration. Until then, Community! YAY!
