It’s the end of the road for Larry Wilmore’s Comedy Central series The Nightly Show.

The decision comes a year and a half after rolling out the half-hour late-night panel show as a forum for underrepresented points of view. The last episode is slated to run Thursday, with the Viacom-owned network planning to slot in Chris Hardwick’s game show @Midnight at 11:30 p.m. until a permanent replacement is found. In explaining the decision, Comedy Central president Kent Alterman says it came down to its inability to register with viewers.

“Unfortunately, it hasn’t connected with our audience in ways that we need it to,” Alterman tells The Hollywood Reporter, “both in the linear channel and in terms of multi-platform outlets and with shareable content and on social platforms as well.”

At launch, The Nightly Show had the benefit of stalwart The Daily Show With Jon Stewart as his opener, and a landscape seemingly in desperate need of a diverse voice just as the Black Lives Matter movement was taking shape. In the many months since, however, Wilmore lost Stewart as his lead-in (he remains an executive producer on The Nightly Show) and instead follows another black voice in new Daily Show host Trevor Noah.

Read more: ‘The Nightly Show’: Larry Wilmore Reflects on 100 Episodes and Losing Jon Stewart as a Lead-In

Wilmore, who informed his staff of the network’s decision early Monday, didn’t hide his disappointment. “I’m really grateful to Comedy Central, Jon Stewart, and our fans to have had this opportunity,” he says in a statement to THR, leaning on his “Keeping it 100” mantra as he continued: “But I’m also saddened and surprised we won’t be covering this crazy election or 'The Unblackening’ as we’ve coined it. And keeping it 100, I guess I hadn’t counted on 'The Unblackening’ happening to my time slot as well.”

The timing - after two seasons or, as of Thursday, 259 episodes - is believed to have come down to contractual logistics. Comedy Central is said to have been faced with a looming decision to sign Wilmore and what insiders say amounted to be about 15 members of the Nightly Show’s on- and off-screen staff to new contracts. But with the series averaging a particularly grim night-of rating of 0.2 in the 18-49 demo, for instance, doing so was hard to justify.

“We just didn’t feel like we had enough traction to sign up for another year. It wasn’t about the election; it’s about another year of the show,” Alterman adds. “Sadly, we’ve been hoping against hope that it would start to resonate in any of those quarters and we just weren’t seeing evidence of it. As much as we like Larry and the uniqueness of the show and the voices that are on the show - not just in terms of ratings - it hasn’t resonated in terms of our fans engaging with show with consuming or sharing content or having a dialogue about it on social platforms.”

Read more: Larry Wilmore on the Challenges of Breaking Into Late Night and Why He Teases John Oliver

In June, Wilmore, 54, told THR that growing that social footprint with viral videos wasn’t particularly important to him, nor was it the focus of his series. “It’s not designed to have the type of things that [Jimmy] Fallon and [James] Corden do, like the [carpool] karaoke type of thing or lip sync battle and those types of things because those are such pure comic things,” he said. “Ours is so much more specific and has different structure to it, so it does get shared, but it’s just a different tone.”

The decision puts an end to Wilmore’s decade-long tenure at the Viacom-owned network. He began in 2006 as the “Senior Black Correspondent” on The Daily Show. When Stephen Colbert announced he’d be leaving his Colbert Report post at Comedy Central for one at CBS, it was Stewart who suggested and ultimately lured Wilmore as his replacement. Initially, Wilmore’s series - billed early on as a mix between The Daily Show and Politically Incorrect - was set to be titled The Minority Report, but he was forced to abandon the latter because Fox had a scripted series of the same name in the works. Wilmore remains an executive producer on ABC’s Black-ish, which he was set to run before before being tapped at Comedy Central, as well as HBO’s upcoming Issa Rae comedy Insecure.