Excitement! Suspense! Cliffhangers! Or…not.

[mrissa]

Further in my watching of ten gajillion cop shows with my workouts, I have noticed an alarming tendency to try to add suspense in all the wrong places. Not every season has to end with a cliffhanger. If people like your show, they will keep watching your show.

I repeat: NOT EVER SEASON HAS TO END WITH A CLIFFHANGER.

But if you do choose to end

Comments

[mamculuna]

I don't know your feelings about Game of Thrones, but since that show does quite often kill off major characters, cliffhangers could work. But they don't use them all that much--I'm thinking especially of the Red Wedding, a season ender that let us know who did and didn't survive.

[sprrwhwk]

Game of Thrones even tends to put its wham moments like the Red Wedding in episode 9 of a season rather than 10, and then uses that last episode to denoument and tease us about the next season (Neln ba gur fuvc gb Oenibf). It's one of the things I really like about it.

With the exception of GoT I almost never watch shows these days as they air, and I won't start something which seems likely to end on a cliffhanger unless I know that episode 1 of the next season is available. I really don't like unresolved cliffhangers. I've almost never found their resolution satisfying, for all those reasons you describe, but at least I can release the tension.

[mrissa]

I find Game of Thrones far more predictable than most people seem to. Yes, it kills major characters, but never the ones who feel "safe." I know this mostly from the books, but I doubt that the TV show has diverged significantly and started killing Arya, Bran, etc.

[laurel]

TV is weird about cliffhangers as they seem to come in and out of fashion and now they're back in again so people seem to expect them at the end of the season. I think previously when they were "in" they were special events, it wasn't every darn show doing them. And these days, it isn't even just season finale cliffhangers, but we have half-season cliffhangers and the like. If they give us cliffhangers at every major break in the season it's no longer exciting at all, especially when shows take a potentially dramatic event and then do everything they can to return the characters and show to the way it was pre-cliffhanger

[mrissa]

I have kept watching Criminal Minds at this point because it remains absolutely perfect pacing for my workouts. It's like the ur-show for that. But it's clearly not the show it was, and there are some things that are actively betrayals of the show it was.

There is a certain degree to which I snap-judge shows on how obvious they are in the pilot. If I can tell you what line of dialog comes next 50% of the time or more, I'm out. This is probably unfair and makes me miss out on blah blah I don't even. Because: 50% or more of the actual dialog, done.

I don't even mind so much when PT is on fast-forward. I figure the time frame of TV shows is all weird anyway. What I hate is when it's toxic and wrong no matter when it happens. Like S4 of Legend of Korra, which literally no one appears to have noticed: there is telling the disabled person that it's all in their head. There is telling them that they don't want to get well and are using their disability as an excuse. There is "relearning to walk" without gait correction (GAAAAAAH

[laurel]

That is painful, I haven't watched Korra so. Eep. And yeah, time-frames on TV shows are weird.

Unless a pilot is painfully awful in multiple ways, I usually watch at least one or two more episodes before giving up because shows may change showrunner, writers, or even cast members between the pilot and the next episode. Plus pilots have such heavy lifting to do, they're often clunky. And many more people are involved in tweaking pilots than in future episodes. It's rare I see a good pilot anymore, there are lots of shows I love dearly which I thought were gonna suck based on their pilots (Community is one).

Weirdly, Homicide didn't have a pilot as the show was ordered without one which may be why the first episode is as good as it is and non-pilot-like. Open-ended, even.

I realized that I inadvertently watched the extended version of the Person of Interest pilot rather than the one they aired and this led to some confusion later because things they had to cut from the long version wound up handled in future episodes in slightly

[mrissa]

The few shows timprov watches any more, he often started by wandering in while I was watching a non-pilot episode, getting hooked, and going back. Because yeah: pilots. Too many cooks etc. He has said he might not even have watched The Good Wife if he'd had to start with the pilot.

[netmouse]

Yeah, I'm getting really tired of this with Castle, especially in that after the summer cliffhanger thenext episode I was able to access seemed plotwise to follow the cliffhanger but was missing scenes I had seen previewed, like hulu was missing half an episode or something. I dunno.

And then for the midseason break they threw in another "and this will mess with the whole premise of the show" cliffhanger, and by this point it's tiresome. My ability to care is getting worn down.

[mrissa]

Good point--it can be actively counterproductive, not just not actively productive.

[sheff_dogs]

I missed the last season cliffhanger of Castle because I've taken to recording shows and watching the cliffhanger just before the new season starts. Foiled this time by my Virgin box dying so it's lost. Alibi over here are re-running all of Castle fron season on so I'll be able to pick it up, but I'm not stressing about it in the meantime.

[mrissa]

I absolutely believed in the peril in Slings and Arrows because it was the sort of show that would totally let its protagonists fail in their play if that was the right thing. In some shows, "will they manage to put on a play?" would get a "duh, of course" answer, because they're just not willing to let the characters hit any kind of bottom. But in S&A there are always new depths to plumb.

Oh, I know! It's partly that I trust Paul Gross at this point. When I watched Passchendaele, I knew that it was not the kind of war movie that would be like, "Well, the Great War was bad, but at least the people who have names came home safely." Because Paul Gross. And the same was true with S&A: I trusted that he was doing something bigger than what I would now think of as a Canadian version of Glee: "oh, those wacky actors and their foibles! but the show must go on." No. No, better than that, much.

He's got a new thing coming out called Hyena Road, and the tagline for it is, "Three different men, three different worlds, three different

[alecaustin]

I guess one of the things that I, as a perpetrator of action plots, find tedious about how other people implement them is how fixated both creators and audience members get on death or injury. Was a major character not killed or seriously injured? Pfft, then your jeopardy and stakes weren't real.

The trouble with this shorthand is that there are a LOT of other ways action can go wrong which everyone then ignores. There are cases where action happening at all is the result of the breakdown of negotiations and certain to cause larger escalations; cases where you're making a moral compromise (or a dozen) to ensure victory; trauma and emotional damage. One really wishes those counted as "real" stakes for more people. (I'm confident that they do in your mind. The larger discourse, though...)

[rysmiel]

I think the failure mode of not having "real" stakes for me ties to the reversibility/recoverability issue, and there is a lot of media out there where trauma and emotional damage that could sensibly, realistically, be developed as an ongoing major issue for the people in question, is instead shoved into a convenient cliche notion of how emotional damage works or is fixed, or just ignored after a bit; and that can make it feel like not real stakes.

[akirlu]

I'm curious to know whether you have watched any of either Life or Terriers, and if so, what you thought of them.

[mrissa]

DVD log says I bounced off Life very quickly. Terriers no, never seen it.

[akirlu]

Pity you didn't like Life -- it does a number of things with the character relationships that are not at all typical, and actually resolves its long arc in a satisfying way. Or so I thought.

[laurel]

It's crazy to me how long ago Life seems now (when it wasn't all that long ago), but then my memory can be particularly awful. I remember liking it a lot when it aired originally and really should revisit it one of these days.

So glad both Damian Lewis and Sarah Shahi have had success in multiple shows since then.