The top 10 TV cliffhangers

TV didn’t invent the cliffhanger, but it did perfect it. It’s the reason we keep tuning into our favourite TV shows week after week/season after season.

Delivered well, a good cliffhanger is divine. It’s the delicious combination of frustration mixed with intrigue with a side of worry for our favourite characters. They keep us coming back.

Good cliffhangers will tease just the right amount of storyline, or deliver a bombshell from left field (a specialty of Lost). Bad cliffhangers will be too complex, reveal too much, or be so over the top it just gets lame (think Dynasty’s Moldavian Massacre season cliffhanger, where everyone was shot at but nobody of consequence died). Ugly cliffhangers are the ones that never resolve, mainly because the show gets cancelled in the off season, never to return (curse you, FlashForward).

Critical to the success of any good cliffhanger is the return episode. If it glosses over facts, ignores plot threads, or doesn’t deliver on the sizzle from the preceding ep – that’s when we turn off and cast the show aside like so many sands through the hourglass.

So, my top 10 cliffhangers :

10. Prisoner (Cell Block H)  – End of Season Three (1981)

It was the season finale that showed a group of inmates escaping their cells and cornering a couple of prison guards that had us on edge. The Wentworth Detention Centre descended into a full riot and nobody knew who would survive.

9. Melrose Place – End of Season Three (mid 1995)

The popularity of Melrose Place in its time was typified by the fact that many homes and bars held weekly ‘Melrose parties’ where people could all sit around and discuss the many plot twists and relationships they’d just vicariously lived through. It got no better than the season three ending explosion of the apartment complex, caused by resident psychopath Kimberly (Marcia Cross), who’d been recently served divorce papers by husband and love-rat Michael (Thomas Calabro). In the end one person died and Alison (Courtney Thorne-Smith) lost her eyesight temporarily. Good times.

8. Buffy – End of Season Five (mid 2001)

Joss Whedon knew how to get the best for his audience by season five when he offered the unthinkable. In it, Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) dies to save the world from the portals to hell opening. She saves her sister Dawn too who has been captured by an exiled hell-God who determined Dawn was the key to Glory returning to her dimension. I KNOW, RIGHT!! Buffy was resurrected at the start of season six by her friends, however only had the power to hang in there for two more seasons.

7. Home and Away – End of Season 15 (2003)

While Neighbours has had its fair share of decent cliffhangers, it’s hard for it to beat this favourite that combined both a shock and a revelation at the same time. While the Sutherland family were buried alive in a mineshaft (gotta keep your eyes peeled for those around Summer Bay) and no one knew if they were going to make it, AND THEN we learn that Angie Russell (Lorie Foell) was actually the mother of Tasha Andrews (Isabel Lucas)! How could such a nice girl be the spawn of that evil, conniving woman?

6. 24 – End of Season Two (mid-2003)

The unique twist on this series, having each episode represent an hour of time “in real life” and running for 24 episodes to represent one hell of a day for the characters, meant that each week we had a mini-cliffhanger to drag us all in the following week. It was the season ending episodes that caught us as the season’s story lines wrapped but also hung a significant twist in the final minutes to ensure we tuned in for the next season. The final episode of season two had Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) save our asses again by stopping World War 3 after delivering critical information to President David Palmer (Dennis Haysbert), which averted a military strike on the Middle East. Phew. As President Palmer stepped out of his limo to enter a venue for a speech, he collapses on the footpath after shaking hands with a well-wisher who then dumped a skin-glove in the bin showing they’d poisoned him! The President was gonna die! In the end, no, he didn’t.

5. The West Wing – End of Season One (mid-2000)

Not a bad way to end the first season of a politically charged hit show, and ensure that people tune in for season two. President Jed Bartlet (Martin Sheen) had just finished hosting a town hall meeting and was leaving with his staff to get in their cars when the party is shot at by a group of white supremacists. The attack on the President was massive news at the start of season two, though it turns out the target was actually the President’s young African-American aide Charlie Young (Dule Hill). Everyone survived, but it set great precedent for a show that is a perennial favourite.

4. Sherlock – End of Season One (2010)

A magnificent re-imaging of the original Sir Arthur Conan Doyle tale of detective Sherlock Holmes and his working partner Dr Watson, this BBC series delivered three compelling episodes with an updated and ‘Aspergerish’ Holmes (Benedict Cumberbatch) and Dr  John Watson (Martin Freeman) as a world-weary retired special forces soldier. With only three episodes in the series, it was always written as three individual stories tightly connected, but not revealed until the appearance of Jim Moriarty (Andrew Scott) as Holmes’s great nemesis. The final episode of the season ends in a stand-off between Moriarty and Holmes, with the former admitting it was he that had staged all the crimes Holmes had been investigating. The final seconds show Holmes pointing a loaded gun at a bomb on the floor… and we have to wait until 2012 to find out what happens from there. A true edge-of-your-seat finale.

3. Friends – End of Season Four (mid 1998)

Along with everything else this ground-breaking ensemble cast comedy taught us, it was that comedies can have great cliffhangers too (and story arcs that last over multiple seasons). Rachel (Jennifer Aniston) had stayed in New York with a very pregnant Phoebe (Lisa Kudrow) – acting as surrogate for her recently discovered brother’s triplets – while the rest of the gang had gone over to London for the marriage of Ross (David Schwimmer) & Emily (Helen Baxendale). Rachel decides to fly over and stop the wedding as she realises she is still madly in love with Ross. She arrives at the wedding but can’t go through with it, but does get to hear Ross say as his vows “I, Ross, that thee, Rachel…” instead of that of his stunned bride standing opposite him. Oh, and Chandler (Matthew Perry) and Monica (Courtney Cox) sleep together. Confused? Don’t be. It’s hilarious and gorgeous.

Here’s that moment:

2. Lost – End of Season One (mid 2004)

If you never got into Lost, there’s no explaining it to you. Especially the final couple of seasons – that just got weird (and not in a good way). All you need to know is a jetliner crashes into the ocean and a few people manage to get to the island nearby and survive. They discover they are not alone, and soon label the mysterious other people on the island “The Others”. Of course there are attempts to leave the island to get help and season one ends with Sayid (Naveen Andrews), Sawyer (Josh Holloway), Michael (Harold Perrineau) & his son Walt (Malcolm David Kelley) on a raft trying to escape to get help. They are set upon by The Others in a boat, and they take Walt. It’s gut-wrenching and just when you think all hope is lost… BANG! Jack (Matthew Fox), Kate (Evangeline Lilly), Locke (Terry O’Quinn) & Hurley (Jorge Garcia) have opened the hatch with some explosives they found and they peer into nothingness. If you can get a hold of it, the entire first season of the show is addictive viewing, including the amazing aftermath of the plane crash that is episode one. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.

1. Dallas – End of Season Two (mid 1980)

Who shot JR Ewing (Larry Hagman)? That was the question on the tip of everyone’s lips for months after the perfect bad guy got his comeuppance at the end of the second season of Dallas. It cemented the use of the cliffhanger as a season-ending plot device, and drove the moment into pop culture history and the phrase into our vernacular. After a season where JR had angered almost everyone in the state of Texas, a long gunman enters JR’s office as he works late one night and shoots him twice. Thanks a to a writers strike that followed, it took an inordinate amount of time for the world to find out it was JR’s sister-in-law and mistress Kristin who shot him in a fit of rage. JR didn’t press charges and Kristen claimed she was pregnant to JR as a result of the affair. It has been referred to and recycled many times, but no better than at the end of the sixth season of The Simpsons when Mr Burns was mysteriously shot by a lone gunman after upsetting the entire town of Springfield (Maggie, the Simpsons’ baby, did it, accidentally).

Did we miss anything? Which cliffhangers do you remember, for better or worse?

From the very first moment Steve Molk was plonked in front of a TV he knew what he wanted to do, but instead he settled for talking about television a lot. When he grows up he hopes to make it up to his Lovely Wife and children. He has very direct views on television network programmers who alter TV schedules without telling anyone. You can follow him on Twitter right here.