Whitney Cummings's self-titled sitcom Whitney returned to NBC last night to kick off its sophomore season, and the ratings weren't great. Whitney earned a 1.4 rating with adults 18-49 and 4.2 million viewers overall, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Those numbers are right in line with the debut of Animal Practice (5.2 million an 1.4), which preceded Whitney in the Wednesday 8pm timeslot before NBC canceled it for low ratings. Like several of NBC's comedies, Whitney is only picked up for a truncated 13-episode season this year (with an an order for 5 additional scripts), and with ratings like that, I wouldn't expect the network to order more. [...]
NBC is still continuing to find new depths to how much it can torture Community fans. In the past, the Peacock Network has put the show on hiatus, fired creator Dan Harmon, and gave it a late premiere for its truncated fourth season in the "Friday night death slot," but apparently, that's not enough. Vulture reports that NBC has decided to delay the new seasons of Community (and Whitney) indefinitely. Both shows were set to premiere next week on Friday, October 19th, but they've been taken off the schedule, with NBC releasing the following statement:
"Given the success we’ve had for the past four weeks… we’ve [...]
It's new job time! Over at Portlandia, Bill Oakley has been promoted to co-Executive Producer (and they start writing season three next week!). Whitney just got a new showrunner in Friends' Wil Calhoun (old showrunner Betsy Thomas is heading to NBC's Guys With Kids), while Up All Night will now be helmed by Everybody Loves Raymond's Tucker Cawley. What TV comedy did you become showrunner of today?
We reported earlier in the evening that Anne Heche's Save Me and Ryan Murphy's The New Normal were joining Matthew Perry's Go On in NBC's fall schedule. Even later last night, NBC picked two more single-camera sitcom pilots, 1600 Penn and Animal Practice. 1600 Penn is a White House-set family sitcom, co-created and starring Josh Gad. Animal Practice is a comedy set in the office of a curmudgeonly veterinarian (Justin Kirk). Also announced was that Greg Daniels's Friday Night Dinner, Sarah Silverman, Hilary Winston, and Roseanne's Downwardly Mobile no longer have a shot to be picked up.
Will these new comedies affect our old favorites? Yes, pretty significantly. To make [...]
Tonight on Happy Endings, Penny will celebrate her 31st birthday, but it'll be hard for the character to top Casey Wilson's 30th:
For my 30th, I thought, I'm gonna blow it out and do the biggest birthday ever, and I was insisting that everybody do two or three tequila shots, which is such a bad idea. People were actively saying, "No, we don't want to!" because I was peer-pressuring them. And then my girlfriend Whitney Cummings and I had so much tequila that we were randomly pulling our pants down and taking our tops off and dancing. People were like, "Stop, ew, get out of here!" It was [...]
