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'Zero Hour' canceled after only three episodes

'Zero Hour' was canceled after airing three episodes on ABC. 'Zero Hour' was canceled following a season premiere which was the lowest-rated for ABC for a scripted show during the regular TV season ever.

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Phillippe Bosse/ABC/AP
'Zero Hour,' starring Anthony Edwards (pictured), was canceled after airing three episodes.
  • By Molly Driscoll Staff Writer

The drama “Zero Hour,” starring “ER” alum Anthony Edwards, was canceled after airing only three episodes on ABC.

“Hour” followed Edwards as Hank Galliston, a man who publishes a magazine based around the paranormal, who must save his wife after she’s kidnapped and becomes involved in a historical conspiracy. The show premiered Feb. 14 and had aired three episodes so far.

When “Zero” premiered, it was watched by 6.3 million viewers, which was the lowest-rated ABC premiere for a scripted show during the regular TV season ever. The show kept falling, luring in 5.3 million viewers for its second episode and 5 for its third. In its 8 p.m. air time, the show was up against boffo programs like “American Idol” and “The Big Bang Theory,” though, as pointed out by the Huffington Post, it attracted only 5 million viewers on a night when CBS, which is the home of high-rating Thursday comedy “The Big Bang Theory,” wasn’t even airing new episodes.

An ABC spokesperson told the Huffington Post that it hasn’t yet been determined when the remaining episodes of “Zero Hour” will air, though the summer is a possibility.

Reviews for the show were mixed, with some, like the Hollywood Reporter, somewhat won over by the show’s “Da Vinci Code”-like premise.

“Zero Hour has lots of twists and turns that could be worth following,” the Hollywood Reporter’s Tim Goodwin wrote. “It also has the DNA to be laughably bad… This is your opt-in or opt-out moment. For me, I’m in. Broadcast television is a graveyard right now.” 

Others found the pilot incomprehensible. The Star-Ledger writer Vicki Hyman called the exposition “clunky” and the dialogue “laughable.”

“The creator has said he'll tell a single story in 13 episodes (we've heard that one before), with a separate mystery unfolding for the second season, if there is one,” she wrote. “Based on the pilot, I doubt they'll make it to lunch.”

The slot formerly occupied by “Zero” will be filled by repeats of the business-pitch reality show “Shark Tank,” according to ABC.

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