‘Community’ season 6: NBC explains cancellation, hardly endears itself at all
How about this for NBC seemingly thumbing its nose at all “Community” fans? Network head Robert Greenblatt addressed the show’s cancellation at the network for the first time since May at TCA’s Summer Press Tour early Sunday, and he was pretty quick to distance himself from anything related to the show or its fan campaigns.
Specifically, Greenblatt made it a priority to say that he didn’t have anything at all to do with the whole “six seasons and a movie” campaign that was started thanks to a season 2 episode, ironically in a joke about another show in “The Cape” that was canceled after just a handful of episodes:
“That sixth season thing was created by them — I’m surprised they didn’t say ’10 seasons and a movie.’ And [the mantra started] before my time [at NBC]. It didn’t just make sense for us to have another season of it at that level of audience.”
Here’s the funny thing, though; while NBC may not have originally created this mantra and didn’t use it that much in their publicity campaigns, they certainly didn’t discourage it either. Everyone knew that this was a huge part of the show’s identity, so for Greenblatt to suddenly come out now and be like “it’s not my problem” is worth an eye-roll.
The other thing that we’ll criticize him for is not even getting the whole “six seasons and a movie” joke to begin with. He should know better than anyone that six seasons are the length of the average actor contract, and that was why that number was specifically chosen.
Anyway, we’ll get off of our collective soapbox now. “Community” has a new home in Yahoo!, and hopefully it will be one that seems to understand what it has better than NBC did. We’re not going to be completely negative about the network, though, given that they probably did keep Joel McHale and company on the air a lot longer than other networks would have given the ratings. We have to at least credit them for allowing it to be alive long enough to get the Yahoo! deal.
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Photo: NBC