Cliffhangers

TV is one of the few forms of narrative media that can pull off the cliffhanger with any frequency. Movies rarely know about their sequels ahead of time, and books will use cliffhangers for chapters more often than at the end of the book. Television loves cliffhangers, however, because networks love ratings, and cliffhangers make people want to watch the next episode to find out what happens. And that’s what TV is all about—getting you to watch the next episode.

There are three times when cliffhangers normally occur in television series (not including the “act out”—the “something shocking” that happens before a commercial to keep you from changing the channel). Rarely, a series will decide to end every episode with a cliffhanger. Alias did this for much of its first season; each episode ended with Sydney in some dangerous situation. However, “main character in peril” is not highly effective as cliffhangers go; it will rarely leave the audience with the feeling of “what’s going to happen now?", which is the most powerful form of cliffhanger. Instead, the audience focuses on the how; okay, we know the protagonist is going to get out of this, but how are they going to do so? It’s a cliffhanger with less intensity, and can be potentially dangerous if the audience thinks the showrunners are trying to play them. Generally, viewers like to think that the people who write the shows they love are smart, but not that the people who write the shows they love think they’re stupid.

Occasionally, a show will have a two-parter (or multi-parter), and these can also end in cliffhangers. A lot of times these are also less intense cliffhangers, though occasionally characters will be thrown into peril. The majority of the time, something about that episode’s storyline will be revealed at the end of the episode, throwing what we as the audience know into disarray.

The most common time for cliffhangers, however, is the season finale. TV lives off of buzz, and if you can get your viewers talking for the rest of the hiatus about what’s going to happen, you’ve kept them thinking about the show, and they’re more likely to watch it when it returns. This is also one of the few times when a “main character in peril” cliffhanger can work; few major cast overhauls happen midseason, but they can happen at the end of one. Of course, in the age of internet spoilers, this is a lot less worrisome than it used to be—viewers can confirm whether or not the actor is signed on for subsequent seasons with a quick search.

The most famous cliffhanger of all time is “Who Shot JR?” of Dallas. The season ended with someone shooting J.R. Ewing, one of Dallas' main characters. The next season’s premiere is still the third-watched episode of any show in number of viewers (beaten only by a Super Bowl and the M*A*S*H series finale). One of my favorite pieces of TV trivia is that a session of Turkish parliament was apparently suspended so that members could go home and watch the premiere.

And when a TV show has enough pull that it is influencing the workings of foreign governments… well, then you know the cliffhanger is doing its job.