Awkward Renewed for Season 4 by MTV

Deadline is reporting that MTV has given high school comedy Awkward a fourth season renewal and hired Chris Alberghini and Mike Chessler to act as showrunners. Creator Lauren Iungerich departed the show after production for season three ended, reportedly due to friction with new MTV President of Programming Susanne Daniels. No episode count has been announced for the fourth season yet; season three will have 20 episodes in total.

Alberghini and Chessler most recently worked on the final season of The CW’s 90210 reboot. Other credits include 2008 ABC drama Cashmere Mafia, which starred Lucy Liu and Frances O’Connor, and Tori Spelling’s VH1 comedy So noTORIous, which lasted one season.

Awkward has been one of two scripted successes in MTV’s recent move into original scripted content. Along with Teen Wolf, the comedy has able to find a passionate following and critical success, in addition to its place on the pop culture radar. It’ll be interesting to see how (or if) the show noticeably changes under the new regime, considering that the first three seasons will have a very distinct voice that could be hard to replicate.

The change also comes at an awkward (heh) time for the show itself, as ratings weren’t the best during the first part of season three and fan anxiety about the direction the show is taking its main character only increased with each successive episode. There’s a chance that the new showrunners could recalibrate who Jenna Hamilton is and make her a more likable (or at least more understandably flawed) figure than she was during the first half of season three, something that might need to be done in order to stop the ratings bleeding and keep the show float for a while longer.

The second half of Awkward‘s third season, which began this past spring, will premiere sometime this October on MTV.

Will you be watching the fourth season of Awkward, knowing that the creator won’t be involved? How do you expect the show to change under Alberghini and Chessler’s watch? Should the fourth season be the final go-around for the series, as long as they’re against the idea of going the college route?