The meta-sitcom "Community" may finally be truly over.
After dodging the bullet of cancellation several times -- largely thanks to other series doing worse -- the comedy met the end of the line at NBC last season. And now talks to revive the series on Hulu have fallen apart.
Streaming services bringing back beloved, low-rated series always seems like a good idea; sites like Netflix and Hulu are less beholden to ratings than are broadcast networks, and are better-positioned to capitalize on an intensely devoted fan base.
And yet reviving canceled TV series comes with a lot of complications, including actors who've moved on, as Netflix learned when its revival of "Arrested Development" took the odd structure it did in order to accommodate all of its stars. The "Community" stars are still under contract until June 30, after which reviving the show will become "Arrested Development"-level impossible, but they need to get paid. And broadcast TV shows are expensive -- and only get more so as they age.
So it's almost certainly goodbye to "Community," a show whose fans have gotten far more of the show than they ever could have hoped for. Where else but NBC in collapse mode could a series nominally about a community college, one that spent more time on highbrow genre pastiche, and whose show runner was in a perpetual state of falling apart, have survived for five seasons? Even if this is the end of the story, it's a pretty intriguing one.
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