Toward a taxonomy of season finales
Okay, all of this does have a point, and I will get there, eventually. All I really wanted to talk about was the season premiere of Chuck, but I do tend to find many things on which to fixate along the way. I do hope some of it piques your interest enough to keep reading as I blather.
To summarize the plot so far: Cliffhangers. Ending one episode of a serial narrative with a situation whose outcome is precarious and uncertain, in order to generate suspense for the following installment. A frequent feature of serial novels, melodramatic film serials, and one that is still very much in use in contemporary television shows.
The use of the cliffhanger in prime-time television shows appears to have waned somewhat, however. In fact, an over-reliance on cliffhanger endings in a single show seems to be one of the factors (along with awkward compression of time-frames, a tendency to treat character/personality/alignment as fundamentally mutable, and too much focus on romantic pairings at the expense of the central drama) that make viewers complain that a given show has become too much like a soap opera , because soaps, the modern version of film melodrama, employ cliffhangers at the end of most episodes. I posit that this may be a sign that contemporary audiences deem cliffhangers too overt a manipulation, that the emotional appeal of this narrative technique is so obvious that they often have the opposite of their intended effect, alienating the viewer, bringing him or her out of the story.
This is doubly true when it comes to season-finale episodes, for which writers, faced with the task of getting a viewer to hold on for a hiatus of months and tune in again for the next premiere, have largely abandoned the season-ending cliffhanger, so familiar from Dallas’ “Who Shot J.R.?”* and the like. (There are, of course, notable exceptions, such as one of my favorites, HBO’s True Blood, both of whose season finales to date have ended on cliffhangers, not to mention roughly half of its midseason episodes.) Along with the problem of giving audiences much more time to become alienated by the manipulation rather than coming along for the emotional ride, season-finale cliffhangers run into the practical problem that, in some cases, the makers of a show do not know whether the show will be picked up for another season when they are writing/filming the finale. They thus run the risk of ending the show, or rather having it ended for them, in a deeply unsatisfying way.
But wait just one minute, I hear you say, I watch enough TV to know that that just isn’t true. Most shows do still end their seasons with big mysteries or revelations, how can you say that cliffhangers are less popular now?
Well, that is the distinction that this entire line of thought has been heading toward. Certainly the ending of a TV show’s season will often have some kind of twist or revelation. Television writers and showrunners have not gotten rid of the need to keep viewers interested from season to season. Far from it. They have simply turned to slightly different ways of doing it. And so we find the two most common ones, which I will call “the last-second reveal” and “the game-changer.”
The last-second reveal is a favorite of mystery-based shows, especially those that unwind a single long mystery (or several) over the course of a season. An analogue of the “twist” that has been a feature of many recent Hollywood films, the last-second reveal is an intentional surprise, an unexpected turn that brings certain formerly incomprehensible or unremarked aspects of the show’s plot into focus and sense. This is a narrative technique that is different in an important sense from most films’ twist endings, in that it usually answers only some of the questions raised by the show’s mystery, while leaving others open and, most importantly, creating new questions that often form the center of the next season’s mysteries.
The game changer is a turn of events at the end of the finale episode that, well, changes the game. It is a pivotal moment, in other words, that suggests to the viewer that in the following season, things about the show to which viewers have become used, the template or pattern or conventions or setting &c., will be totally different. While it runs the risk of irritating viewers who have come to cherish these aspects of the show, this technique banks (wisely, in this scholar’s opinion) on the fact that even these viewers will tune in to the next seasons premiere, if only to see how badly their favorite show got cocked up, giving the show big numbers for the premiere and giving the writers at least one more episode to reel these apprehensive viewers back in. (More on that in the next post, on, finally, Chuck.) This technique is also a great favorite of writers who are placed in the aforementioned precarious position of not knowing whether a next season will be forthcoming. Unlike a cliffhanger ending for a show, or a show that ends on a last-second reveal that leads to yet more questions (I’m looking at you, Battlestar Galactica), a game changer is a satisfying and natural ending for a show, as narratives stretching back at least to Greek drama tend traditionally to end on a moment when everything changes. The audience is left in the pleasurable position of being able to speculate about the characters’ new future without worrying whether the playing out of that future would make a good, or recognizable, show.
I don’t want to put too much pressure on the distinction between last-second reveals and game changers. In general, reveals cause the viewer to reflect back on and reinterpret earlier events of the show, while game changers cause the viewer to speculate about future ones. But there is clearly a great deal of overlap between the two; many last-second reveals are also game-changers, and vice versa, and some writers will interlace one of each, or more than one of both, into a single episode.
I do, however, wish to stress the difference between these two narrative techniques and that of the cliffhanger. Under a less precise definition of ‘cliffhanger,’ such techniques might be included, the one as a kind of cliffhanger for the viewer’s logic (“will they be able to make this twist make sense, jibe with everything that has come before?”) and the other a cliffhanger for the viewer’s emotional connection to the story and its characters (“will they be able to maintain these as the characters and show I love, given this new situation?”)
But under the strict sense of cliffhanger that I have expounded, in which a cliffhanger is an installment that ends on a event whose outcome is uncertain, these other techniques do not generate cliffhangers. (Which is not to say, again, that an episode may not contain both a cliffhanger and a game changer, as they sometimes do.) The uncertainty in these cases does not concern an event, but the entire past or future of the show.
A fruitful way to understand this distinction is to examine the kinds of speculation that the different ways of ending episodes/seasons invite. Cliffhangers ask viewers to spend the intervening time speculating about the outcome of a binary—either the protagonist lives or he dies, the poker hand wins or loses, the marriage proposal is accepted or not—and only secondarily, what the implications of one or the other eventuality might be. Game changers and last-minute reveals, on the other hand, encourage the viewer to speculate about a broad range of events and outcomes, a range that in effect embraces the whole of the show in question. This provides a further reason that cliffhangers feel somewhat “crude” to contemporary audiences, while these techniques have the appearance of sophistication, leading, among other things, to statements in the popular press about the increasing complexity of recent television shows—and a parallel increase in the “jaded” and “demanding” nature of modern TV audiences.
When we return: Why the hell did I tell you all of this? And so what?
*Note that under the distinction I make here, the cliffhanger of the “Who Shot J.R.” episode is not the titular question of who did the shooting, which falls into none of the categories/techniques I outline here, but is simply the creation of suspense by means of a new mystery whose solution is deferred to the next season. The episode’s cliffhanger is the question of whether J.R. lives or dies.
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