Why Bones' Forgotten Spin-Off Series The Finder Was Canceled

By 2011, "Bones" had been running for six years and was a bona fide hit for Fox. The offbeat procedural — which also included a slow burn romance between Temperance Brennan (Emily Deschanel) and Seeley Booth (David Boreanaz) — earned a solid viewership with its unusual mix of humor and upsettingly-detailed crime scenes. So, it was only a matter of time before the network expanded the "Bones" universe when, in 2012, Fox launched "The Finder."

Loosely based on "The Locator" books by author Richard Greener, "The Finder" emerged from a backdoor pilot in the sixth season of "Bones" of the same name. That installment introduced Major Walter Sherman (Geoff Stults), an Army veteran whose traumatic brain injury turned him into a paranoid eccentric with an uncanny ability to locate pretty much anything. Flanked by his manager and legal advisor Leo Knox (Michael Clarke Duncan) and a pilot named Ike (Saffron Burrows), Sherman ran a finder-for-hire business in the Florida everglades.

When Sherman returned in 2012 for his own series, little had changed except that Ike was replaced by U.S. Marshal Isabel Zambada (Mercedes Masöhn), who joined the spin-off alongside teen hacker Willa Monday (Maddie Hasson). "The Finder" debuted as a mid-season replacement but only ran 13 episodes before Fox pulled the plug. Why? Well, the show just wasn't able to leverage the popularity of "Bones" and struggled in the ratings until the network decided it wasn't worth the investment.

Despite a pilot episode with rock legend John Fogerty, "The Finder" debuted to less than stellar ratings on January 12, 2012. According to TV Series Finale, the inaugural episode earned a dismal 1.7 rating among 18-49-year-olds and was seen by only 5.5 million viewers, signaling that this would not be among the best spin-offs in TV history. That represented an almost 30% loss of viewers from "Bones," which acted as the lead-in series.

For a while, it looked as if "The Finder" would recover, with subsequent episodes improving the ratings. But not only did Fox somehow manage to air the episodes out of order, things really took a turn when the network moved the spin-off from Thursdays to a Friday night death slot. In its first Friday airing, "The Finder" earned a 1.1 rating and brought in around 4 million viewers. Had the show retained a significant following after its time slot shuffle, it may well have earned a renewal.

But the network wasn't impressed with its performance, and that renewal never came. "The Finder" had faced heavy competition in its Thursday time slot where it went up against "Grey's Anatomy" on ABC, "The Office" on NBC, and the then newly launched "Person of Interest" on CBS. So, where were those "Bones" fans? Well, according to creator Hart Hanson, they were affronted by the very concept of a spin-off.

"Bones" may have been a big hit, but its fandom was surprisingly intolerant of change, at least according to creator Hart Hanson. When Hanson spoke to the Los Angeles Times in 2012, he expressed his disappointment in the "Bones" fandom for not supporting the spin-off. "I was hopeful that the 'Bones' audience would check it out," he said. "But as I said to the network: 'It's always tough to explain the 'Bones' audience to people.'"

According to the series creator, every character he and the writers introduced on "Bones" had been "roundly hated from the get-go," to the extent that he advised Sweets actor John Francis Daley to refrain from looking at Twitter or message boards for a year after his debut. In that sense, "The Finder" was somewhat doomed from the start. "I got a lot of messages saying, 'Hey, quit trying to force 'The Finder' down our throats,'" Hanson explained. "There was no way to explain to people that 'The Finder' wasn't replacing 'Bones.'"

Had the show been given more time, it might well have evolved into something beyond being one of the worst spin-offs of the last few decades. However, according to a 2010 report from Entertainment Weekly, Hanson was already facing difficulties before "The Finder" episode of "Bones" even aired. Even before it went to air, "The Finder" wasn't the hit that Fox imagined.