ABC has yanked "The Nine" off the air, effective immediately. And, while we're told that the show will return at some point, we've been given absolutely no indication of when that might be.

A month ago, I would have cared. Today, not so much.

I was enthusiastic about "The Nine" when it began. After watching the pilot, I wrote that it was "at least a 9 out of 10 on a quality scale," and featured "good writing, good characters, a good cast and enough of a mystery to grab your interest."

It grabbed my interest. It just didn't hold onto it.

The saga of a group of people whose lives came together when they were held hostage for two days during a bank robbery was coming apart. Personally, I was getting less and less interested as each of the first six episodes aired.

Finally, I looked at how many shows I had to watch for this job, how many shows I'd recorded on the DVR, and simply deleted Episode 7 of "The Nine" (the one that aired last week) without bothering to watch it.

A couple of days later, ABC announced it was taking the show off the air.

Weirdly enough, the network made the announcement on Saturday. What, were they trying to slip it past us? Were they thinking we wouldn't notice?

Well, maybe not a lot of us, given the way the ratings were going.

"The Nine" didn't exactly do poorly when it premiered, but its ratings were almost 30 percent lower than the show that preceded it, "Lost." And losing that many viewers is never a good thing when you're looking to stick on a network schedule.

And it only got worse. Through seven episodes, "The Nine" averaged only about 8.6 million viewers, less than half the number who watched the shows ("Lost" and "Day Break") that preceded it.

So the exile to hiatus-land wasn't exactly unexpected.

For the time being, we're getting a couple of extra hours of a newsmagazine — an edition of "20/20" tonight at 9; an edition of "PrimeTime" next Wednesday. After that ... nobody at ABC is saying.

"The Nine" joins ABC's other numerically named new series, "Six Degrees," in the limbo-land reserved for shows with lousy ratings that might get another chance. But probably not much of a chance.

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E-mail: pierce@desnews.com