It’s official: we are weirdos, outside the mainstream, who like things that most people find unpalatable. Admit it, you’ve always known it deep down, but now we have the TV ratings to prove it: over 10 million more people watched The Big Bang Theory than Community last night.
No, last night’s ratings weren’t great for the shows we like to champion around these parts. Community was watched by 3.98 million people; Parks and Rec, 4.11; The Office, 7.63. Whitney actually did OK, with 6.71 million people watching that. But compared to Two and a Half Men (28 million), 2 Broke Girls (19 million), and The Big Bang Theory (14 million), they’re all losers. It’s those numbers for Community and Parks and Rec that really break my heart; they’re both down significantly from last year. The two best comedies on network TV by a wide margin are being pretty much ignored by most people. I’m not sure how they can survive with those numbers.
But hey, they exist right now, right? We at least have that. And when NBC ends up canceling Community and replacing it with the sort of lowest-common-denominator multicam show that prints money for CBS, we can at least turn to cable, where there are far more outlets for the type of comedy that we misfits love so much than ever before. Because man, it certainly doesn’t look like it has much of a future on network TV.
