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There was good news and bad news when Andrew Nemec picked up the phone earlier this week. It was ABC sharing word that Nemec's American version of "Life On Mars" had been canceled.

While that was hard enough to take, Nemec did get good news: they still had a chance to end the series without leaving its loyal fan base hanging.

"We've felt from the beginning that if the show wasn't going to get its legs for a second season, nothing would have been more of a gift from the network and the studio than to give us the opportunity to find the creative closure a lot of shows don't get," Nemec told the Los Angeles Times. "It's all a bit sad, but it doesn't come without its closure and finality."

"Life On Mars" is based on a British series of the same name that starred "Doctor Who's" John Simm in the role of Sam Tyler, a role given to Jason O'Mara for the ABC version. While both shows will end up with virtually the same number of episodes, the ending from the Simm version -- where Tyler was in a coma the whole time -- won't be among the similarities.

"If you've been watching the show and paying attention, I think in the last frame, you'll find yourself saying that we didn't cheat you," Nemec said.

The announcement from ABC came as the "Life On Mars" crew was just about to film its final episode of the season.

"We did go into a bit of a mad dash of rewriting to adjust stories," he said. "It was heartbreaking to have to write it and simultaneously cathartic to be able to do it."

The series featured Tyler getting hit by a car in 2008 and ending up in 1973. While loyalists to the original BBC series said the American version was too watered down, the ABC version did have its followers.

"Life On Mars" premiered with a 7.7 rating/13 share in overnights when it first aired Oct. 9, actually beating "Eleventh Hour" on CBS by 5 percent and making easy work of "ER" on NBC. The battle between the two genre shows would take a different turn the second week, however, when "Eleventh Hour's" audience climbed 8 percent while "Life On Mars" free-falled 27 percent, and was never really able to recover.

Life for "Life On Mars" got worse when ABC decided to move the shows to Wednesday after a long mid-season break to follow "Lost," yet another show that deals loosely with time. But the move didn't work. "Life On Mars" dropped another 40 percent in the timeslot, and was losing nearly 38 percent of the lead-in audience from "Lost."

For its remaining episodes, "Life On Mars" airs Wednesdays at 10 p.m. ET on ABC.