'Animal Practice' is canceled – which NBC show is taking its slot?

'Animal Practice' has been canceled by NBC, leaving an empty spot in the Wednesday lineup that will rescue another Peacock show from Friday nights.

Just one week after hearing that the October 19th season premieres of Whitney and Community on NBC had been delayed, one of these shows now has a official premiere date.

Today, NBC announced their first cancellation of the season by giving Animal Practice the axe after the ratings didn’t impress executives enough to keep it around. Whitney will air in the now vacant Wednesday time slot at 8pm starting on Wednesday, November 14th.

This isn’t immensely surprising as we previously predicted that a canceled show might allow for Whitney and/or Community to escape their dreaded Friday night time slots. After all, NBC did say, “When we have a better idea of viewing patterns in the next few weeks, we will announce new season premieres of ‘Whitney’ and ‘Community.’”

But we’re still not sure what this means for Community. Now the series – coming into a shortened 15-episode season 4 – might be all by itself on Friday unless Guys with Kids, NBC’s other low-rated freshman comedy series, gets canceled, too.

Honestly, I think the best option would be to put Community on Tuesdays with Go On and toss The New Normal over to the Thursday night line-up when 30 Rock finishes its 15-episode final season. That means we’d have to wait a little bit longer for the return of Community, but it might be worth it so the show has a fighting chance at surviving.

Either way, this game NBC seems to be playing with Community fans isn’t good for the show as the average viewer doesn’t know what’s going on behind the scenes. If anything, this shows that NBC doesn’t care about Community, and I’m not sure they’re invested in the series lasting, even through a full season 4.

Ethan Anderton blogs at Screen Rant.