Community, one of our favorite NBC half-hour comedies, may or may not be on the chopping block. One website compared the ratings of Community to other sitcoms on NBC, and … let’s just say … it didn’t go well. 

TV By The Numbers, which collects ratings on a weekly basis, ranked the NBC shows in its Renew/Cancel Index. The result slammed both Community and NBC:

On ABC, CBS or FOX, the woefully rated Community would have been canceled, probably long ago. But on the primetime trainwreck that is NBC it’s on its third season. The network, plus the fact that after four season’s worth of episodes it can be sold into syndication (and co-producer Sony has shown it will slash the fees to achieve that for a sitcom), means that even with cringe worthy ratings, Community is no worse than a “toss up”, and is probably a bit better than that.

What is most confusing to us is whether this is good news in the guise of an insult or just bad news all around. Overall, the website predicted that it is a “toss up” on whether or not the show will be canceled by May 2012.

The site ranks all channels based on their respective numbers, hence the website’s name, and describe’s its ranking system this way:

The Renew/Cancel Index is the ratio of a scripted show’s new episode adults 18-49 ratings relative to the new episode ratings of the other scripted shows on its own network. It’s calculated by dividing a show’s new episode Live+Same Day adults 18-49 average rating by the Live+Same Day new episode average of all the new scripted show episodes on the show’s own network. The network’s average ratings in the calculation are not time weighted (ex. hour long shows are not weighted twice what 30 minute shows are).

What are your thoughts on this ranking system? What are your thoughts on the show’s murky future? Will it make it to syndication?