Kyle XY: ABC Family TV Show Cancelled, No Season Four

After three seasons, ABC Family’s Kyle XY TV show is coming to an end. Will viewers get answers to the ongoing storylines about the young man without a belly button?

Kyle XY centers around a young man (Matt Dallas) who wakes up in the middle of a Seattle forest — naked and without a memory. The police call in psychologist Nicole Trager (Marguerite MacIntyre) for assistance and she ends up bringing him home. Her husband Stephen (Bruce Thomas), daughter Lori (April Matson), and son Josh (Jean-Luc Bilodeau) almost immediately take to “Kyle” and make him feel like part of the family. He begins to show incredible intelligence and physical abilities that lead the Tragers to realize there’s far more to Kyle than meets the eye. Others in the series include Chris Olivero, Kirsten Prout, Jaimie Alexander, Nicholas Lea, Chelan Simmons, Magda Apanowicz, Martin Cummins, Leah Cairns, J. Eddie Peck, Teryl Rothery, Conrad Coates, Cory Monteith, Josh Zuckerman, Kurt Max Runte, and Malcolm Stewart.

The show premiered on June 26, 2006 on ABC Family and became an instant hit. It attracted 2.6 million viewers and became the cable network’s highest-rated show to date. The pilot was repeated on ABC and over 5.2 million people watched. The first season was made up of 10 episodes and the show was quickly renewed for a second year.

Kyle continued to enjoy very healthy ratings into the second season. They were so good that ABC Family ended up ordering 23 episodes, a longer season than most series on the major networks. In May 2007, ABC Family president Paul Lee proudly said, “Kyle XY is the highest-rated show ever on ABC Family; it is truly the show that has defined this network.”

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Unfortunately, that sunny outlook didn’t continue for very long once the ratings started to fall in the latter part of season two. Kyle’s third season’s premiere episode attracted just 1.5 million viewers and other ABC Family shows outperformed it by a wide margin.

ABC Family has just announced the renewal of two shows — Greek and Lincoln Heights — as well as the cancellation of Kyle. No details were given for the cancellation but the decline in ratings, higher production costs, and castmember contracts coming up for renewal are all believed to be contributing factors.

The third season of Kyle kicked off on January 12th and is expected to conclude on March 16th. It seems likely that the network will continue to air all of the episodes on schedule.

Because the series finale was shot well before the cancellation news came down, it seems unlikely that all of the show’s ongoing storylines will be resolved when the last episode airs. Will fans get the answers they’re looking for or will they be left hanging forever?

Image courtesy ABC Family.

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