Dear readers, I had originally conceived this as a Streaming Saturday. After all, the two examples I’m about to give you are both streaming series. But, I’ve decided to include it in the regular mix because it applies to antenna TV and pay TV as well.
Like you, I watched the season enders of both Rings of Power and House of the Dragon in the last month. To be honest, I’d pushed back Rings a while, since I didn’t terribly like it. But that’s not the point. Both series end their freshman seasons with pretty big setups for the following seasons. So much so that both have had the same criticism: that the whole of season one was nothing more than a setup for when things “really” start to happen.
I wouldn’t quite say that these were “cliffhangers” but they certainly hope to force the viewer into watching future seasons. While there’s good and bad to this approach, I think it’s gone too far and I’d like to tell you why I think so. But first I think we need to look back a little.
Cliffhangers and the history of television
The term “cliffhanger” dates back to the pre-television days. Back then, inexpensive films called “serials” came to movie theaters once a week. Most weren’t very good, but they made money because people went to see them. The worse the writing and acting was, the more that filmmakers relied on cheap gimmicks to get people to come back. One of those gimmicks was leaving the leads in some sort of peril at the end of an installment. In enough cases, this literally meant having them hang off a cliff, so that the term got some traction.
For most of the history of TV, cliffhangers were rare indeed. Most shows didn’t get a multi-year pickup. Despite what we would think of as stellar, enviable ratings, most shows fought for a seat at the table every year. So, tantalizing an audience with a cliffhanger ending didn’t seem smart. Eventually, though, a few shows felt confident enough to include a cliffhanger at the end of a season. The most famous was, of course, 1980’s “Who Shot J.R.” episode of Dallas.
In the 1990s and 2000s, series orders got shorter. In TV’s heyday, shows were generally greenlit for a full season or at least a half of one. If the show didn’t perform, its remaining episodes would be shown during the summer. But that model broke with Seinfeld, whose 5-episode first season was called (at the time) “the shortest series pickup in history.” That show went on to great acclaim, partially because the break between seasons 1 and 2 gave its creators time to think.
Cliffhangers become common on TV
With shorter series orders, producers looked to figure out ways to guarantee that second order of episodes. One sure-fire way, they thought, was to include cliffhangers. If the show had any ratings at all, it was sure to get viewers fired up when they saw the leads in danger. So shows “on the bubble” started using this technique to try to get full-season pickups for the following year.
For the most part, it didn’t work. A lot of shows ended with unresolved issues. I recently binged Mike & Molly, which ended with the leads getting a baby followed by a hasty wrapup episode when it was clear that the show was ending. Similarly, American Housewife, which starred Mike & Molly’s Katy Mixon, ended its last season with the lead becoming pregnant.
Perhaps the most annoying one for me, though, was HBO’s Watchmen. The show’s first (and it turns out, only) season ended with a heck of a cliffhanger. I won’t spoil it for you but I will say that it’s never going to get resolved, at least not while Discovery owns Warner. The show was acclaimed and expensive, two things that apparently Discovery’s management want to avoid.
Where we are now: cliffhangers as prequel
From here on, it’s going to be hard to avoid spoilers. But, I’ll try.
The Rings of Power. House of the Dragon. It’s hard to think of one without thinking of the other. Both are extensions of established fantasy works, taking place in a faux-medieval setting with fictional creatures at the center. There’s a divergence in the details, but sometimes it’s hard to remember that as you’re watching them. Throughout their first seasons, I’ve generally only remembered which one I was watching when one of them (Dragon) became too dark to see anything.
Both ended their first seasons recently, and both chose a similar path. For Power, the classic series character revealed in the finale was finally free to start making big changes. For Dragon, there were no big reveals, but we did learn that the real action would be taking place in the next season. In both cases, it was really a modified “cliffhanger” format, because you learned at the end that you really weren’t watching a self-contained story.
Both shows have guaranteed second season pickups. Both are absurdly expensive, so it will take time before we see those second seasons. Dragon seems (at the moment anyway) free from the spectre of cost-cutting that’s gutted HBO Max this year, because it’s so buzzworthy. Rings can go on indefinitely and barely dent Amazon’s amazing wealth.
Still seems like a sucker punch
Yet, the revelations at the end of these first seasons still feel like a gut punch. Both have taken a dozen hours of my life to get to this point, a point where the “real” story is finally free to start. I’m so bitter at Rings that I may not even watch season two unless there’s a commitment to better acting and storytelling. As for Dragon, the best news here is that showrunner Miguel Sapochnik probably won’t return. As far as I can tell, Sapochnik is the one who has been responsible for the absurdly dark imagery in season one. Maybe I’ll be able to watch season two with the lights on.
Of course it will be a year or more before these shows return, and by then I’ll need a refresher course from YouTube just to remember half of them. That’s the broken promise here, folks. When old movie serials left the lead tied to the train tracks, you could come back next week. When J.R. got shot, you had to wait all summer but not much more than that. Here you’re waiting a year or more, and that’s not cool. It never was, and it sure isn’t now.
In the end, this sort of storytelling is supposed to allow showrunners to tell the kind of deep, involved stories that you couldn’t resolve in ten episodes. What it really does, though, is strain of the goodwill you’ve built up with your audience. When you have a show that’s absurdly poorly lit, or ridiculously poorly acted, there isn’t a lot of good will left to lean on.
