The Art of The Cliffhanger

August 4, 2009  |   Filed under: Features  |   Posted by:

By: Adrian Sannen

As a child, you would always have a superhero. Depending on your generation you’d have your Spiderman, Superman and Batman, but they all had at least one thing in common (not the spandex)… cliffhangers. They’d put out an issue of their comic and instead of finishing it, they’d cut you off cold-turkey and you had to wait until the next allowance and the next issue to see what will happen to your identity-hidden protagonist.

Yes, the cliffhanger ending is a useful and most of the time very effective tool for any writer when the climax is almost at your finger tips, but recent events leave me wondering if today’s writers are waiting much too long to wrap up a story line that should have ended a while ago.

Here’s three ways to know if a cliffhanger are coming)

  1. Crazy finale-like events are occurring half-way through the shows allotted time slot.
  2. You’re nearing the end of the episode and the protagonist is on his death bed
  3. Or (if the show has been going for a while) you can check the shows past history.

Many shows recently have been ending ENTIRE SEASONS on cliffhangers that just do not sit right with me. I get the fact that you want to rope in viewers for the next season and it’s a good idea because most of the time it works, but when you’re a writer for shows like House M.D., Supernatural and Grey’s Anatomy, you already have enough loyal viewers to start new story lines. Sometimes you just feel like there’s one thing keeping your favourite character from going on with his/her life, why prolong that?

Sometimes, even the cliffhanger is a cruel, cruel thing. For example on The CW’s hit show Supernatural, they ended the season on a very happy note. All of Hell’s 66 seals had been broken and the two demon fighting heroes were awaiting the arrival of Satan himself, Lucifer. You see a light coming from the ground and just as The Devil himself is about to rise up, the episode ends. That’s right. Jerk move CW. Can you think of a bigger tease than them fighting Satan?!

Will their shameless ploy to bring back viewers work on me? Find out next time on TVDoneWright.com …

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