NBC knows it peacocked-up comedy
When NBC announced its broadcast schedule for the fall of 2016, the lineup featured a glimpse of the past. And it wasn’t the time-travel adventure series Timeless: For the first time since 2013, the network would lead its Thursday-night lineup with comedy. With Superstore and The Good Place set to restore “the NBC comedy DNA we’ve been determined to rebuild” (so says Robert Greenblatt, chairman of NBC Entertainment), discussion at the Television Critics Association press tour turned to why the network has to restore its storied comedy brand in the first place. What had Greenblatt and NBC Entertainment president Jennifer Salke learned from their experiments in appealing to a wider audience? When you peacock comedy, as Greenblatt and company did back in 2012, what’s the takeaway?