The NBC comedy “Community” has finally come to the end of its gap semester.

The show, a collage of pop-culture references and elaborate, inventive parodies involving a group of likable misfit students at a theater-of-the-absurd community college, returns Thursday night, much to the relief of one of the most passionate fan bases in television.

The sitcom’s acolytes — mostly young, many in college and many among those now outside the reach of conventional audience measurement because they watch online — reacted with disbelief when NBC shelved “Community” in December, midway through its third season. The network replaced it at 8 on Thursday nights with the multiple-Emmy-Award-winner “30 Rock.”

But surely no one was as tormented as the show’s creator, Dan Harmon, who admitted to being terrified because the episodes on which the show’s future now rides — the 12 remaining this season — are the ones he wrote, he said, “while I was so bummed out that we were off the air.”

“Now that people are throwing ticker-tape parades, giving us a hero’s welcome, what if they lay a bomb?” he added in a telephone interview from Los Angeles. “My stomach is in knots.”