Because I've been watching the show. I just thought that the observation that the show is "being held hostage" is off the mark.
And sadly, the show is dead weight, as far as NBC's concerned. Folks just aren't watching, and after watching all the episodes that have run, I can't really blame them - it's been kind of dull. Heck, just look at this thread - it's all ratings/scheduling talk. If this was such a great show worthy of saving, you'd think there'd have been some talk about the story or performances over the past month.
Still, it's gotten more talk than its competition, which has gotten little or no talk on this forum.
Funny how it works that way sometimes, where the higher rated shows get little or no talk on this forum, while struggling shows get a lot of talk. Case in point: the shows on Monday at 10 PM.
If I'm enjoying a show, and then NBC pulls it off their broadcasting schedule due to bad ratings, it's similar to holding it hostage from my POV as I would have suffered through commercials to watch the HD broadcast of it. So rather than bleed even more in the ratings rat race, NBC is now moving the remaining episodes to their online site, the viewing quality will suffer (from previous HD viewing standard). As a fan of the show, I wanted to see all 13 episode broadcasted in HD (even if it meant showing the episodes on Saturday night), not streamed online.
It's a piss-poor decision by a piss-poor company. IMHO they really had something going this season with KIDNAPPED and HEROES. Too unfortunate they didn't market KIDNAPPED properly. It could have been up there with 24.
This last episode really introduced some new elements. I thought Doug Hutchison's character was the main bad guy, now we see he's not. And to throw away great acting by some really talented actors, Hutchison, Lindo & Sisto most notably, is just a real shame networks always do this crap. Yet these stupid reality shows just get shoved down our throats year in and year out.
How did they "not market Kidnapped properly"? They gave it a time slot where they had traditionally been strong, advertised it, made the pilot available for people to watch beforehand. The show shed viewers week-to-week and few cared enough to follow it to Saturday. That's not something people like to hear, but you can't blame every show's failure on bad marketing and unscripted programming.
People who like a show always seem to blame the network when it gets pulled but as Jason said Kidnapped lost viewers each week so something was not working. Now if it maintained or showed slight growth week to week then you would have a point going after the network brass.
Strictly speaking, NBC didn't cancel further production, but just informed the producers that they wouldn't be ordering any more after the initial 13. As to not giving the show a long run, that's television in the twenty-first century. The logic seems to be that serialized programs that lose viewers week to week aren't likely to gain them back, so how long should a network be expected to hang on to see if this is the show that defies that pattern?
I have next to no experience at watching anything on the web and am pretty sure that my connection is not fast enough to make that likely. But, given that that's where Kidnapped now lives, I went exploring on NBC.com last night and got the idea that the next episode will come up on 11-10. If there was a new episode put up last night I haven't found it yet.
Well at least they let them wrap production on 13 episodes and we'll get to see a proper ending. According to what I've read online the 13th episdode wraps this week (that's got to be a bummer set to work on). According to the NBC website there will be a new episode every Friday.
Also unrelated but Smith is now on Innertube, there's 7 episodes total and the crew has a video of how they were planning to end the season.