The Power of the Cliffhanger

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MachineGhost
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The Power of the Cliffhanger

Post by MachineGhost » Tue Aug 28, 2012 11:59 am

According to Jason Mittell, an associate professor of film and media culture at Middlebury College, whose book “Complex TV”? comes out next year, the main exceptions were not dramas but two sitcoms, each of which was a satirical response to the daytime soap operas: “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman”? and “Soap,”? which aired in the late seventies. “Mary Hartman”? was created in 1976, by Norman Lear, the pioneering sitcom creator behind hits like “All in the Family,”? but, despite Lear’s pull, many stations ran the show late at night, considering it too avant-garde for early evening. At once a soap opera and an anti-soap, the show was an assault on a TV-addled audience, with its heroine becoming as alarmed by the waxy yellow buildup on her kitchen floor as she was by the revelation that her grandfather was the notorious Fernwood flasher. In the Season 1 finale, a cliffhanger, she had a breakdown on “The David Susskind Show”? and was institutionalized; when the show resumed, she discovered that her fellow-inmates were a Nielsen-ratings family.

The 1977 series “Soap”? was a lighter concoction than “Mary Hartman,”? but it, too, brought serial DNA into prime time, including regular cliffhangers. Each week concluded with a cheerful narration (“Does Dutch really believe Eunice is planning a surprise shower for him? Or is Eunice really in for a surprise? Will Billy and his teacher ever be alone long enough to have an affair?”?), followed by the kicker: “These questions—and many others—will be answered in the next episode of . . . ‘Soap.’ ”? The first few seasons were written by Susan Harris, who had also been a writer for Lear on “All in the Family”? and “Maude.”? In “They’ll Never Put That on the Air: An Oral History of Taboo-Breaking TV Comedy,”? by Allan Neuwirth, Harris’s husband and partner, Paul Junger Witt, described their aims not merely as satire but as an attempt to “free ourselves of the shackles of a really difficult storytelling form,”? the enforced closure of episodic storytelling, in which characters rarely changed and plots couldn’t leap.

In 1979, NBC ran a ten-episode show called “Cliffhangers!,”? an experimental homage to the early cinema serials, such as “Kathlyn,”? which was quickly cancelled. But less than a year later the first great TV cliffhanger emerged, and it changed the model of network television. Initially, “Dallas”? was a slow-moving nighttime soap opera about a family of Texan oil and cattle tycoons. The series had risen to become a top drama on CBS, when, on March 21, 1980, an episode called “A House Divided”? aired. Larry Hagman’s J. R. Ewing—a villainous minor character who became, through Hagman’s magnetism, the smirking star of the series—was plugged in the gut. The nation had a new catchphrase: “Who shot J.R.?”?

The real culprit behind the shooting was a network brainstorm. “We had done, I think twenty-two shows, and CBS was making so much money they wanted to extend it for four,”? Hagman recalled, in 2010. “And our producers said, ‘Let’s just shoot the S.O.B. and figure it out later.’ ”? J.R. was featured on the covers of Time and People. CNN, which had just been launched, devoted a series of segments to hyping the show, hoping for some pop heat during that grim year (hostages in Iran, the economy in the dumps). But the cliffhanger might have been less effective if Hagman hadn’t walked off the set. He flew to Europe and demanded a raise, which triggered rumors that the producers would resort to a plastic-surgery twist to replace him with Robert Culp. In July, a Screen Actors Guild strike delayed production for three more agonizing months.

By the time the resolution—“Who Done It?”?—aired, eight months had elapsed, giving CBS an opportunity to rerun the original season. These delays made “Dallas”? a global phenomenon. (A session of the Turkish parliament was reportedly suspended so that members could tune in.) The solution to the mystery was concealed even from the cast members, each of whom was filmed shooting J.R. Eventually, the culprit was revealed: Kristin, J.R.’s sister-in-law. (J.R. didn’t press charges, because she was carrying his baby.)

“Who Done It?”? became the highest-rated episode in TV history, watched by an estimated three hundred and fifty million people worldwide. The show’s success spawned endless imitators, on soaps and non-soaps and sitcoms and dramas: weddings, births, bombs, the invasion of the Moldavian terrorist, Jim kissing Pam, a plane crashing into Wisteria Lane, Ross saying “I take thee, Rachel,”? the illumination of the Hatch on “Lost,”? and so on. Once soap entered prime time, its conventions fuelled the complex dramas of the nineteen-eighties, among them “Hill Street Blues”? and “St. Elsewhere.”? These shows brought greater depth to storytelling, but they also relied on the pleasurable shocks of “junk”? genres, including the cliffhanger—sometimes with brassy absurdity, as when Rosalind Shays plummeted down that elevator shaft on “L.A. Law,”? in 1991.

David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks,”? the critically adored auteurist breakthrough of the nineties, acknowledged its debt to the genre directly, with the soap-within-a-soap “Invitation to Love,”? to which the show’s small-town characters were addicted. The series even ended with its own surreal cliffhanger, in the midst of uncertainty about a third season: Agent Cooper, possessed by the evil spirit that had killed Laura Palmer, bonked his head against a mirror, giggling maniacally and moaning, without explanation, “How’s Annie?”?

In the late nineties, television took a great leap forward. This story could be told in many ways: by focussing on the quality cable dramas, starting with “The Sopranos”?; by emphasizing luminous genre myths like “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”?; or by highlighting experimental sitcoms, such as the British version of “The Office,”? themselves a reaction to the advent of reality television. Pugnacious auteurs emerged, resistant to TV formulas. The result was one innovation after another: juggled chronologies, the rise of antiheroes, and a new breed of challenging, tangled, ambitious serial narrative. Dramas often combined a plot of the week with longer arcs, a technique pioneered by “The X-Files,”? allowing for subtler levels of irresolution. Some ambitious comedies incorporated serial elements, while others, like “Arrested Development,”? satirized cliffhangers in much the way that “Soap”? had.

While not every show embraced cliffhangers (David Simon’s “The Wire”? resisted them), many series, like “24,”? made a fetish of them or used them selectively, as elements of a primal cinematic universe, like “Breaking Bad,”? a deep meditation on morality that was also a throwback to movie serials. In the gorgeously filmed Season 3 finale, Jesse (Aaron Paul), the young junkie immersed in the meth business, showed up at the door of the cheerful, eccentric Gale, a man targeted only for the crime of potentially replacing our antiheroes. Jesse held a gun, but his eyes filled with tears. His hands shook. A shot went off—but it was unclear what had happened. We had to wait more than a year to find out, but Vince Gilligan, the show’s creator, had built his story skillfully enough that those thirteen months welled up with meaning. The show’s heart-in-throat suspense had become inseparable from its resonant themes, from the cruel calculus of modern capitalism to the American fantasy of masculine autonomy.

Technology was a crucial factor in this change, including DVDs, TiVo, and the emergence of a vibrant online TV-fan community. “The idea that viewers would want to watch—and rewatch—a television series in strict chronology and collectively document their discoveries with a group of strangers was once laughable, but is now mainstream,”? Mittell writes in “Complex TV.”? Television was no longer an ephemeral experience, to be watched and discarded: it could be collected, shared, and analyzed.

In this changing landscape, it’s worth acknowledging how cliffhangers, broadly defined, link disparate genres: they connect “Fringe”? with “The Good Wife”? and the languid, dreamlike “Mad Men”? (which hung off a cliff for more than a year after Don ran off to marry his secretary). They echoed through the finales of the smart thriller “Homeland,”? the exquisite dark comedy “Enlightened,”? and the delirious melodrama “Revenge,”? in which Madeleine Stowe stepped onto a jet rigged to explode. (I suspect that, like Kimberly, she’ll be back.)


http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/t ... n_nussbaum
"All generous minds have a horror of what are commonly called 'Facts'. They are the brute beasts of the intellectual domain." -- Thomas Hobbes

Disclaimer: I am not a broker, dealer, investment advisor, physician, theologian or prophet.  I should not be considered as legally permitted to render such advice!
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