YAHOO! SAVES COMMUNITY

"Six seasons and a movie" has been the rallying cry among fans of the quirky NBC comedy Community since the end of its second season, when low ratings appeared to have doomed it. It got through five seasons on the strength of avid fan support — not quite enough to satisfy the need for six seasons to provide enough episodes to make the Sony-produced series viable for broadcast syndication. But now it has been rescued — not by anyone at NBC but by Yahoo!, which plans to bring the sitcom back in the fall. AdWeek reported today (Thursday) that Yahoo! has agreed to provide the producers with the same budget — reportedly $2 million per episode — that NBC did. "The budget won’t be cut one dollar … We didn’t want to be producing the show at any less of the quality or production value that we had been producing," Zack Van Amburg, president of programming and production at Sony Pictures Television, told Entertainment Weekly. It is altogether fitting that the final shows should air exclusively in the form of streaming video; some reports have suggested that the series — which aired opposite CBS’s enormously popular The Big Bang Theory — was watched by more people online than on the air. There’ll be one difference. As series star Joel McHale noted in an interview with EW: "It’s the Internet. We can swear now."