NBC quoted low ratings and played the ‘writers strike’ card to cancel Journeyman.

After the series got cut off at the 13 episode mark, viewers were left in the dark as to where the story was headed.  This was particularly annoying since a few different strands of story were developing during the shortened season.

The creator of Journeyman – Kevin Falls, in an interview over on AICN had the opportunity to let some of his plans for Dan Vasser out of the bag. Though this sounds like a good thing, the down side to this is that the interview wasn’t going to hit the ‘net until they knew for sure that we wouldn’t be seeing any more of Dan Vasser…

Crap.

Have you ever wondered why some TV shows are canceled due to supposedly low ratings when it seems like they have a strong following? Sometimes there are obvious reasons – like when CBS scheduled Jericho up against Fox’s American Idol, or Journeyman possibly being a victim of bad timing with the writers’ strike and too many reality show hitting the networks.

One of the systems that has the biggest impact on what we get to watch on television is called the Nielsen Ratings. It was founded by Arthur Nielsen in 1923 and through statistical sampling measurements, extrapolates what audiences are watching across the country. This information is important to advertisers who pay dearly for much coveted time slots in which they know the audience is watching.

So. Journeyman has really reached its end… and that’s a travesty. I wrote about NBC’s cancellation of Journeyman a week ago and there was a lot of passionate response to that piece.

In this excellent final episode, titled Perfidia, Dan (Kevin McKidd) meets someone who claims to be another time traveler on one of his trips. The problem is that Dan has appeared in an insane asylum, putting everything he (Evan) says in doubt. Evan is infatuated with a woman he met in college who doesn’t remember him now, years later.

Dan’s brother Jack, who now believes Dan time travels is leaning heavy on the professor/scientist who obviously knows what the heck is going on for answers.

Katie’s annoying sister taints the show with yet another appearance.

Livia is pretty much dead weight. Again.

Be warned, spoilers follow…

People really disappoint me. How in the heck could a show as great as Journeyman have ratings so low that it gets canceled?

It seems the deadline for NBC to renew the show was yesterday, Dec. 11th, and they let it come and go without doing a thing. On their side is the fact that this week’s episode, without a Heroes lead-in, had the least number of people who tuned in to watch the show so far.

And no, this wasn’t due to the writers strike… it was just low ratings.

It looks like NBC’s excellent time traveler series Journeyman is a victim of not only the writers’ strike, but poor ratings as well.

Kevin Falls, creator of the series:

“Episode 12 is the end of our order, and let’s not kid ourselves. It’s a longshot that we would get a back nine, given the strike and our questionable numbers”

“Numbers” meaning ratings and “back nine” meaning the remaining number of episodes required to complete a full season.

I don’t know about NBC’s new show Chuck, but at least with the season two premiere of Heroes and the series premiere of Journeyman they’re on the right track. The two shows packed a solid one-two punch of mystery/sci-fi entertainment in their premiere episodes of the 2007 Fall season.

There will be some pretty good spoilers following, so stop reading if you don’t want to know.

Heroes began with the familiar voiceover combined with quick scenes from season one intercut with scenes from future episodes, showing us that Sylar is indeed still alive as well as giving us a peek at a few of the new characters. As a matter of fact, by the end of the show we see that everyone who was at the final showdown last season survived. The episode picks up four months after the events of last season’s finale.

The 2007 Fall television season has started and for those of you who are Tivo-less and need to know when shows are starting, there are some biggies coming up next week. I won’t be covering them all, because I already watch too much TV and some just don’t interest me, but here are the ones that I think may be of interest to Screen Rant readers:

But will Journeyman travel forward in time, keeping us enthralled enough to stay on the tube? Only time will tell. (I can’t believe my fingers just typed that!)

Some years ago (That’s like, back in time!), Seven Days made a bid at time travel being used to fix problems, but Journeyman, staring Kevin McKidd (HBO’s Rome) as Dan Vasser, will be fixing personal issues as opposed to government issues, I’ve been led to believe.