Who, besides Carla, is pregnant on the “Scrubs” May 16 season-ender?
Does Dr. McDreamy practice CPR on Meredith in the supply closet on the season ending “Grey’s Anatomy” on Sunday?
Do Horatio and Marisol marry and live happily ever after on “CSI: Miami”? Conversely, who dies on the May 22 sign-off?
And will we get any closer to understanding that island on “Lost’s” May 24 two-hour season send-off?
The action is TO BE CONTINUED as TV’s hits wrap for the season. The month of May means cliffhangers, goosing ratings and giving viewers reason to return in the fall.
On the best series, the style of cliffhanger is evolving. It’s less about physical jeopardy, more about psychological puzzles. Less “Who Shot J.R.?” and more “what metaphysical points are they making with the hatch?”
“The cliffhanger has graduated onto a more mature level,” said Howard Gordon, writer-producer of “24.” For him, “After all these years it’s about finding a new place to put Jack Bauer emotionally.”
“People want to go for a ride. It’s a very modern style, shows like ‘Lost,”‘ said Tim Kring, writer-producer of NBC’s “Crossing Jordan.” He agrees the Internet and other technology have spurred writing changes. “Literally,” Kring said, “the TiVo is part of it, you get tiny clues laid in (by writers) to be watched several times.”
TiVo moments are new, but the cliffhanger is as old as storytelling. Scheherazade kept the Sultan tuned in through 1,001 nights, early radio serials from “Captain Marvel” to “The Shadow” and “Flash Gordon” held listeners rapt “until next time.” By the time “The Simpsons”
offered “Who Shot Mr. Burns?” viewers could spot the clichés jumping off the screen.
A car pitches off a cliff, the frame freezes and we know it will be three months before we know who survives. Add a “Fugitive” angle to the scene and you’ve got a recent cliffhanging episode of “Prison Break.” Or undercut everything we know about the identity of a character, just as a car crashes, and you’ve got the “Alias” twist.
Today’s audiences seem to favor subtlety over traditional soap operatic gimmicks. Skip the random violence, give us a brain teaser.
The question is not whether Jennifer Garner will knock out bad guys with her hands or with her feet, but how her daddy issues will mess with her head.
Can’t catch a break
On “24,” the question is not whether the tragedy will remain a tragedy. “It’s fair to say he’s not going back to a house in suburban Simi Valley with Audrey,” Gordon said. “Things don’t end well. This guy can’t catch a break. But I hope there’s dramatic satisfaction.”
In the 1970s and ’80s, cliffhangers routinely set a house ablaze and let viewers guess who would emerge alive, an easy out for producers depending upon which actors demanded raises. The mass shooting at a “Dynasty” wedding party in Moldavia is a classic example.
In 2006, the challenge is to avoid clichés but keep the nailbiting.
On Fox’s “Prison Break,” every hour is designed as a cliffhanger. The writing challenge, according to writer-producer Nick Santora, is to respect audience intelligence and avoid getting out of the weekly conundrum “cheaply.”
“If you look at the history of cliffhangers,” Santora said, “go back to early film with shorts and serials before the main feature, it was always a car off a cliff or our hero in chains thrown in the ocean. It was this insane dramatic physical peril. What we’ve been doing on ‘Prison Break’ is basically trying to throw in emotional and psychological peril as well as physical danger.” The physical threat of being caught by guards and having T Bag (Robert Knepper) pull a knife on Michael (Wentworth Miller), is compounded by the emotional and psychological tension of the brothers’ knowing they are scarcely a foot apart but can’t get to each other.
In Santora’s view, “It’s much more interesting to have these cliffhanger moments where the audience isn’t asking, ‘How is he going to get out of this physical box,’ but, ‘How are our heroes going to get past this intellectual problem?”‘
Santora won’t say who isn’t returning next season, but “some viewers may be shocked at who we lose,” as the story shifts to a manhunt.
Make ratings sense
“Crossing Jordan’s” Kring said “cliffhangers are fun to work to as a writing group.” In Sunday’s cliffhanger Jordan (Jill Hennessy) was accused of a murder that she may or may not have committed. “Ours is more a paranoid nightmare, waking up, not remembering what actually happened.”
Kring has never had to resort to the old-fashioned cliffhanger, where the writers toss a bomb into a crowded scene and figure out later who lives. But he does recall a disastrous cliffhanger in the third season of “Crossing Jordan.” The season ended with Jordan’s father, played by Ken Howard, standing over a body with a gun in his hand. Two weeks later, Kring found out Howard was not rehired. Then the show was off the air for 10 months when Hennessy was pregnant. Additionally NBC bounced it to a new night, new timeslot. Because new viewers would have been confused, “we chose to come back with a regular episode,” rather than pay off the cliffhanger. “Fans were livid.”
For producers, “Cliffhangers do bring up a certain amount of anxiety,” Kring said. The immediacy of TV is a problem. “Often you find the world has changed in three months,” Kring said. “Something new has come along changing the way people watch TV. Or the creators themselves change.”
Despite their problems, the cliffhangers keep coming. That’s partly because they still make ratings sense: “If you give the network something high stakes, it’s easier to promote.”
TV critic Joanne Ostrow can be reached at 303-820-1830 or jostrow@denverpost.com.
