On Thursday May 10, 2012 Community was renewed for a fourth season by NBC. As with a few of NBC's other returning comedy shows, the season will be abbreviated consisting of only 13 episodes. On May 18, it was anounced by Sony Pictures Television that series creator and showrunner Dan Harmon was to be replaced by Moses Port and David Guarascio (co-creators of the short-lived Aliens in America). Neil Goldman and Garrett Donovan, Chris McKenna, Dino Stamatopoulos, Anthony Russo, and Joe Russo also left the series. The Season Four premiere was originally meant to be on October 19, 2012 and the show was intended to be moved from the Thursday timeslot to Friday night's before "Grimm". NBC eventually pushed back the premiere date and announced that the show would return on February 7, 2013 at it's original timeslot on Thursday 8:00 EST.
The cast along with the new showrunners Moses Port and David Guarascio appeared at the San Diego Comic Con convention on July 12, 2012. They addressed fans of the show- as well as the media- who had concerns about the upcoming season. They did their best to reassure everyone they wouldn't "screw up", noting that a number of writers (including Megan Ganz and Andy Bobrow) would be returning, and that the show would remain a “weird, wonderful gem and that’s not going to change.” On October 9, Entertainemnt Weekly posted an interview with Port and Guarascio where they reiterated thier intention to remain true to the spirit of the show and also revealed they had talked to Dan Harmon. Although he declined to write the Season Four finale, Harmon did wish them good luck and told them to "go for it.".
It was anounced that Malcolm MacDowell had been cast as Professor Cornwallis, the history professor teaching the course. Michael Ausiello had previously reported that the new showrunners were looking for a "known actor" to play a British professor who used to teach at Oxford. The former Ivy league teacher would at first seem out of place working at a community college but would eventually turn out to be just as crazy as everyone else who ends up at Greendale. On August 31, 2012 TV Line reported that actress Tricia Helfer of Battlestar Galactica fame has signed on to play Lauren, a superfan of "Inspector Spacetime". TV Line reported that the British comedian Matt Lucas, best known for his work on the BBC sketch show "Little Britain", has been cast as a new friend of Abed's called Toby.
Online entertainment newsite Hit Fix reported on October 8th that the Season premieres of both Community and "Whitney" will be delayed until further notice. NBC released this official statement:
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Given the success we’ve had for the past four weeks – including winning the first week of the season in A18-49 – we’ve decided to continue to concentrate our promotional strength on our new NBC shows that are scheduled Monday through Wednesday and have therefore decided to hold COMMUNITY and WHITNEY from their previously announced premieres of October 19th. Without having to launch these comedies on Friday at this time, we can keep our promotion focused on earlier in the week -- plus we will have both comedies in our back pocket if we need to make any schedule changes on those nights. When we have a better idea of viewing patterns in the next few weeks, we will announce new season premieres of WHITNEY and COMMUNITY.
On Friday, October 19, 2012, the day the show was supposed to premiere, a tweet was sent out on Community's official twitter page with a link to youtube video. Featuring the entire cast of Community, it addressed in a toungue-in-cheek manner the delay of the show and assured fans that it would eventually return at a later date. Gillian Jacobs (whose birthday is actually October 19) was credited with the idea for the video by fellow cast member Yvette Nicole Brown[1].
NBC later made an official announcement reported by various online entertainment news sites from Variety to Entertainment Weekly confirming the news. It's scheduled to return as a midseason replacement in it's regular time slot at 8:00pm EST on Thursday.
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