Much has been made of new NBC president Bob Greenblatt’s commitment to giving a show time to find an audience (a patience he learned while working in cable), and today he doubled down on that commitment by giving early full-season orders to freshman comedies Up All Night and Whitney after only two weeks on the air. In a statement, Greenblatt said that the network had “made comedy an important goal for us this season,” and cited both shows as unqualified successes at being classified as comedies. Of course, the solid ratings help: Up All Night has held on to an average 2.7 rating in the 18-49 demo, while Whitney handily beats it with a 2.9, making it NBC’s top-rated new sitcom. Greenblatt also praised the new shows’ “creative direction,” which in Whitney’s case must mean “backwards through time, to those halcyon days of the early ’90s.”
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