'Community' gets return date! Here's NBC's comedy plan

Great news for Community fans! The comedy is returning to NBC’s Thursday night lineup.

The not-so-great news: It’s going right back into 8 p.m. against CBS’ Big Bang Theory.

Community will return on Thursday, March 15. Then 30 Rock shifts to 8:30 p.m., followed by The Office and Up All Night. Parks & Recreation will come back on April 19 to finish its run after Up All Night concludes its 24 episodes.

NBC was toying with the idea of giving Community a different time slot than opening Thursdays against Big Bang, where it’s struggled in the past. But perhaps after seeing how, say, 30 Rock has fared in the slot recently, they realized Community isn’t the worst option here.

But that’s not all. There’s new comedies coming to NBC’s midseason lineup too. Bent (March 21 at 9 p.m.) and Best Friends Forever (April 4 at 8:30 p.m.) and the hidden-camera series Betty White’s Off Their Rockers (April 4 at 8 p.m.) will debut on Wednesday nights. Best Friends and Betty White will take the place of Whitney and Are You There, Chelsea, both of which will have aired all of their episodes (22 and 12, respectively).

Bent is about a “romantic comedy about a womanizing, surfer dude contractor (David Walton) and his beautiful, no-nonsense, type-A client (Amanda Peet), who work together to remodel each other’s lives as they renovate her Venice, California home.” Best Friends Forever is about a two longtime friends (Jessica St. Clair and Lennon Parham) who move into a Brooklyn apartment. Betty White’s Off Their Rockers is a Punk’d-style show with a cast of “sassy septuagenarians.”