I think we're going to transition with our comedy programming, trying to broaden the audience and broaden what the network does. Those Thursday comedies, which the critics love and we love, tend to be a bit more narrow than we'd ultimately like, as we go forward.
I'll take any vampire fans I can get. Dracula isn't a serial killer story.
Every so often, it's time to make a change with a showrunner. You evaluate the creative and how the show is run and how the writing staff works, and sometimes you want to freshen the show. We just decided that it was time to do that on Community, and no disrespect to anyone.
I would categorically not rule out that it's not the last season of Community. Does that make sense? I would love nothing more than for Community to have a following on Friday, and to be able to continue it.
It's always bittersweet when you have a show that you own, that's against you. It's against one of our favorite comedies for NBC. And yes, that's part of the business model. House was on the Fox network for a number of years and was such a great business for the NBC-owned studio. That's part of what we're also trying to build. Hopefully, Mindy will help do that for us.
I'm inordinately proud of Smash, on so many levels. The complexity of producing that show, every week, is just incredible. As a television producer and as a Broadway producer, which I once was, I am in awe of what we can do on that show, every week.
In every soap, at the end of the season, relationships end and people leave the show. You look at characters and evaluate whether they're great characters or not, and whether they have a future in the show. And we did all of that.
We had some ups and downs, creatively, as the season went on, which is true of any show. If you compound that by the production that we go through, in terms of original songwriting and recordings, and all that is happening simultaneously, where we didn't do as good a job, as I hope we do this year, is the arcing of the storylines and the consistency of going in one direction with a character, and continuing in a really interesting way with that arc.
