Awkward to Return Tuesday, October 22nd at 10:30

MTV has announced that the fall season of Awkward is set to premiere Tuesday, October 22nd at 10:30. The remaining 10 episodes of the season, which will have 20 installments in total, will answer the question of who Jenna wants to be, something that weighs heavily on the minds of many a fellow high school junior. This will also be the final round of episodes for series creator Lauren Iungerich, who stepped down following the end of production on season three. Chris Alberghini and Mike Chessler (90210) will step in for the upcoming fourth season, to debut next year.

Awkward isn’t in a great place when we pick up with the high school comedy, similar to that of its heroine Jenna Hamilton, who threw away the relationship she worked so hard to get over a boy in her creative writing class. Throughout the first half of season three, Jenna continued to make decisions that, while understandably teenage and symptomatic of her insecurity, brought her likability down to dangerously low levels, something at least partially responsible for the lower ratings the first 10 episodes received. As a result of said lower ratings, Awkward has gone from potential scripted game-changer to having to lean on the next season of Snooki & JWOWW for support on what promises to be an intensely competitive night.

Helping the show is the fact that the network seems to be completely behind it, already ordering a fourth season and giving it said lead-in, so standing between the comedy and a return to the stability it enjoyed in its earlier life is the creative direction for the fall season. If the show figures out a way for Jenna’s journey to be realistically painful without diverging from what made it so captivating to begin with, and the new showrunners have a keen ear for the specific voice of the departing creator, there might still be quite a bit of life left in it.

Will you be watching the fall season of Awkward? Do you think that the show can bring Jenna back to being the person we rooted for at the beginning of the series? In your opinion, why has the show fallen in the ratings (and discussion at the pop culture water cooler)?