After deciding last week that Community will return for its new season on January 2nd and that new comedy Welcome to the Family is canceled, NBC announced today that they’ll be putting Parks and Recreation on a little bit of a hiatus. The show will be pre-empted for the next three weeks and won’t return until November 14th. On November 14th and 21st, Parks and Rec will air back-to-back new episodes before going on another hiatus until January 9th, when it will (hopefully) return for good.
Over the next three weeks, Parks’ 8pm Thursday hour (which is now half-vacant due to Welcome to the Family’s cancelation) will be filled by a rerun of The Voice then an SNL Halloween clip show then a new episode of The Voice. Don’t worry, this doesn’t mean Parks is in trouble. NBC just wants to boost its 9pm Sean Saves the World/Michael J. Fox Show block with its most popular show, The Voice, and they don’t have a replacement ready for Welcome to the Family ready. So, don’t worry. You’re still getting four new episodes of Parks and Recreation this year, which is just about as many as you’d be getting anyway.
Parks and Rec’s Halloween and election day episodes will now be airing two weeks/a week late in November, and the show will return after its two hiatuses on January 9th with its 100 episode, co-written by Amy Poehler and Mike Schur.