Canceled
I was never really interested in this show. Only saw a few episodes, but just found out that the show was canceled and that there were only 8 episodes for the last season instead of the regular 22.
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Kevin Sorbo did not renew his contract because he suffered an aneurysm that caused three strokes, nearly died, as a consequence was afflicted with chronic pain, which limited his physical activity and has since had to go through years of physical therapy to get back to normal. He wanted to continue and they wanted him to continue but his health had declined so rapidly he was no longer up to the long hours of filming required so they wrapped up the series the best they could hence the eight episodes and why most of the second last season either did not feature Hercules, featured him for a few minutes or were flashback episodes. In a way what the production company did was quite unprecedented as they gave Kevin nearly a year to try and recuperate before realising it just wasn't going to happen. I doubt many TV series would be so generous these days and perhaps that speaks to how well the show was doing that they were so determined to keep it going.
shareHad kevin sorbo been in better health at the time, i wonder what seasons 7-9 would have been like as part of the 3 year extensiom he was offered to continue.
shareI actually thought the reason they were canceled was because the studios that controlled them had other show ideas and wanted to hurry up and finish the show to move on to other things. I know they were only contractually obligated to do those remaining episodes, which is why they did it and then canceled it. I only have this memory of that being the reason because of the big special feature on one of the DVD sets where Kevin talks about it.
As for the gaps in Kevin's appearances, I thought the majority of stuff he missed was in the fourth season (where they had some TRULY terrible episodes) but was in pretty much everything in the last two (or one and a half). Again, I haven't really rewatched the specials in a while, so I'm going purely off of memory.
It was a mixture of things. Ratings had fallen during Season 5 and while they weren't disastrous, the studio was losing confidence in the show. Perhaps more significantly though, Kevin Sorbo and Rob Tapert hated each other by that stage. Ratings for Xena had also fallen, but Tapert fought hard to keep that show going - he admitted he just didn't have the same enthusiasm for Hercules. And Sorbo wanted to do something less physically taxing (his training schedule was pretty brutal, coupled with the typically long shoots). And to be honest I think the writers were running out of ideas a bit - Season 6 is solid, but it brought nothing new to the table. So basically it was a perfect storm that led to its cancellation.
But still, it had a good run with a fairly even quality of episodes (there's only 2 episodes that I would consider really bad) - I think some Xena fans would have preferred that it had been cancelled after Season 4 rather than suffer the uneven quality and silly storylines of the latter two seasons!