Splitsider

Yesterday was officially Mother's Day but, when NBC announced its projected fall lineup, it felt more like Christmas. How about another analogy? Sure. Upfronts are like the NFL Draft, they mark the end of one season and the start of the next, but its still be months before anything plays out. So what does NBC's draft class look like? If comedies were offensive lineman, than NBC drafted like a lot of right guards. We had reported that they picked up a zillion (or seven) new sitcoms but it's still interesting to look at. If you include SNL, NBC has comedic programming five nights a week, which [...]

NBC's comedies get shit ratings pretty much across the board. Sure, The Office does OK, but it's been slipping lately and even at its peak wasn't nearly as high as CBS's behemoths. But when literally not a single NBC comedy is a big hit it's hard to justify canceling the ones with mediocre ratings yet rabid fanbases. So that's good news for us! The prognosticators over at TV by the Numbers, who have a pretty solid track record when it comes to these things, predicts that Community, 30 Rock, Parks and Rec and Whitney will all get picked up for new seasons. We don't have long to wait [...]

NBC's Are You There, Chelsea? is now more likely to be canceled than renewed, according to the ratio of its new episodes' ratings among adults 18-49 to those of NBC's other scripted shows. Cancellation is by no means certain, but it would be surprising to see Chelsea stick around for another season over Whitney, for example. While we saw today that Whitney has its supporters (or at least those engaged enough to argue about it), is there anyone out there making those arguments for Chelsea? Is anyone out there watching Chelsea?

NBC's Wednesday Whitney/Are You There, Chelsea? comedy block did not fare well last night, getting soundly beat by ABC reruns. Could be good news on the horizon for Community fans if NBC decides to pull one or both of those shows. Land ho!

After all that hullabaloo and publicity about its disappearance from NBC's midseason lineup, Community went up in the ratings last night! By one tenth of a point. Meanwhile, Whitney's slipping, which doesn't bode well for its chances when it moves to Wednesday nights.

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 [...]

2 Broke Girls has already been renewed, since it's the biggest new comedy of the year and all, and Whitney seems very likely to get renewed but that isn't enough for Whitney Cummings. This morning, E! announced that it will be adding Love You, Mean It With Whitney Cummings to its schedule. I'm going to go out on a limb and say she doesn't in fact "mean it." It's going to be paired with The Soup on Wednesday nights and will feature Whitney and sidekick Julian McCullough making fun of pop culture. Considering that both of her other shows also feature a lot of that sort of [...]

Unpopular Opinions is a new weekly column in which a writer takes a stand against popular opinion, whether it's asserting the true merit of a supposedly guilty pleasure or dissenting against the universally lauded.

In September, when Whitney was being promoted on every public, large, flat surface from Augusta to Tucson, it was a punchline. Its ad campaign was so viscerally terrible that before the show even debuted it evoked over thirty negative comments on a post we did on it. Then the pilot aired and it didn’t do much to disprove everyone’s hunch. Whitney was wildly and mostly accurately considered to be unfunny, offensive to women, [...]

They call him Bickelhaupt. First name John. He's a "re-recording mixer," you know the old Hollywood type. Only thing dirtier'n his pockets is his recording studio. He moseyed on into my office first thing Monday morning, slapped my secretary across the face and poured the both of us a scotch – neat.

He took his cigar out of his mouth. "What's the word on the New York Magazine article, Cantor? How much do they know?" Then he took another cigar out of his mouth. He was storing a bunch of them in there, I guess.

I shook my head real slow and lit a cigarette. "Jig's up, Bickelhaupt. [...]

Rumor has it that NBC may switch Up All Night to Thursdays after The Office and put Whitney on Wednesdays at 8. Here is a short play about this news: NBC: Well, it just makes more sense, 'cause Up All Night is single-camera and has a workplace element, like the other shows on Thursday. Everyone else: Duh.

Following the misogynist-pleasing news of Last Man Standing's full season order, creator Jack Burditt is leaving the show and Kevin Abbott is stepping in as showrunner. For much of the fall while Burditt was on a leave of absence, his "deputies" Marsh McCall and Andy Gordon were handling [...]

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 [...]

Syndication! Those glorious four syllables are the reason that 30 Rock will almost definitely be renewed for next season even though it's doing even worse in the ratings than Whitney and Are You There, Chelsea?, which might well get canceled. Here are some ways 30 Rock could take advantage of the fact that they're fairly certain to get another season no matter how low their ratings go:

- repeat the script of an old episode but have every actor trade places (Tina Fey as Tracy Jordan, Alec Baldwin as Jenna Maroney, etc.)

- throw a dance party for its characters and writers and film them interacting with no [...]

Emily Nussbaum's New Yorker review of Whitney and 2 Broke Girls is pretty spot-on. She goes beyond the usual Sarah Silverman-Chelsea Handler comparisons and notes that the Whitney of Whitney has a lot in common with Lucille Ball:

Cummings has none of Ball’s shining charisma or her buzz of anarchy. Yet she does share Lucy’s rictus grin, her toddler-like foot-stamping tantrums, and especially her Hobbesian view of heterosexual relationships as a combat zone of pranks, bets, and manipulation from below. “This is war,” Whitney announces, before declaring yet another crazy scheme to undercut her boyfriend, and it might as well be the series’ catchphrase.

The article also considers [...]