CALGARY -- Calgary's Stone age has ended.

The CBC has axed the city-based sleuth series Tom Stone, it was announced yesterday.

The cancellation will cost Calgary $13 million in annual production activity and means the loss of about 150 jobs.

"We're saddened. It's a tough day for people who really threw their hearts into making a show about this place," producer Jordy Randall tells the Sun.

"We know this is the way the business works and it didn't capture a broad enough audience to justify its primetime slot. At the end of the day, it was the ratings."

Stone, which starred Chris William Martin as an ex-cop sprung out of jail to help relocated RCMP investigator Janet Kidder tackle crime in Calgary, debuted last January. The series has attracted 260,000 to 385,000 viewers this season, ranking the highest in Western Canada.

"We were very strong in the Prairies," Randall says. "Certainly Albertans were watching the show. We also had what looked like good support in B.C. and rural Ontario."

As low as Tom Stone's ratings may be, they are hardly bottom-basement compared to other Canadian series.

"We're in the middle of the pack," Randall says. "This is the challenge for Canadian producers -- to figure out what is going to attract a Canadian audience to Canadian television, because currently it's not happening. Ratings are down across the board.

"(Mini-series) like 100 Days in the Jungle and Trudeau have gotten good ratings, but not the series. We've got to find more innovative ways of promoting our stuff."

Production had wrapped on Stone's second season just before Christmas.

Three unaired episodes will run sometime before the end of the season.

"The show had been on so erratically this season, our ratings weren't very high, so I wasn't feeling optimistic," says Kidder, who's in Edmonton shooting the sequel to the horror hit Ginger Snaps.

"You move on, move forward. One thing ends, another will start. It's sad because I don't get to work with these people next season. It's a shame that we weren't on long enough for people to get used to the show."

Despite the cancellation, a contest recently conducted to send a viewer to the Calgary Stampede for free is still a go and a winner has been selected.

CBC's other Calgary-based series, the comedy An American in Canada co-created by A-Channel personality Jebb Fink, will debut Feb. 28. Unlike Stone, however, that series isn't shot here.