Cliffhangers: Stellar TV or scourge?
Binge-watching viewers left waiting a year for answers
TORONTO - SPOILER ALERT: This story discusses plot points from last year’s “Game of Thrones” finale and the most recent “The Walking Dead” season.
There are some “Game of Thrones” fans who are probably dreading Sunday’s season 6 finale.
As blood drained from a betrayed Jon Snow in last year’s season 5 finale and the screen faded to black, countless fans of the epic drama went from shock to anger, knowing it would be a long 10-plus months until they would finally learn if the beloved character was indeed dead.
Fans of “The Walking Dead” are, arguably, somewhat luckier.
April’s season 6 finale also closed with a cliffhanger implying that one of the show’s main characters had just been savagely killed. At least the gap between episodes is only six months, with the season 7 première expected to air in October.
The TV cliffhanger is an age-old device designed to keep audiences returning from one season to the next, but in an era of binge-watching and instant gratification, it’s become a torturous device for some fans.
“The Walking Dead” star Norman Reedus, who plays biker Daryl Dixon, calls the show’s latest cliffhanger “a ballsy move.” He assured fans they’ll get the answers they’ve been dying for “in a large way” at the beginning of the next season.
“It’s going to be a big deal and you’re either going to cry like a baby or you’re going to break something in your house,” said Reedus in a recent interview, adding he’s a fan of the overwhelming drama and tension that comes with an opaque ending.
“Everyone’s got a Twitter and a Facebook and an Instagram and everything else and they need to know ‘Right now,’” he said, “so that’s them. I don’t mind cliffhangers. I like getting ready to watch something.
“I like being all worked up about it and I like screaming at the TV.”
“Damien” showrunner Glen Mazzara, who acted as an executive producer of “The Walking Dead” for the 29 episodes of seasons two and three, feels the cliffhanger trend has gone too far.
“Cliffhangers used to work back in the old days when it was ‘Who shot J. R.?’ (on ‘Dallas’), because you were going off in May or June and then it was just a summer and then you’d come back in September and you’d get that answer,” Mazzara said.
“Once you start moving to a cable model in which you have 10 to 13 episodes, it might be a year or more before you’re back on the air.
“The audience will not tolerate a cliffhanger for a long period of time.”
Clark Gregg, a star of TV’s “Marvel’s Agents of “S.H.I.E.L.D.” and the action flicks “The Avengers,” “Iron Man” and “Thor,” had mixed feelings about the latest “Walking Dead” finale.
“It felt a little bit like a cop-out, but I enjoyed playing the game with it,” said Gregg. “I was on the fence, but some of my friends felt manipulated.”
Last year’s “Game of Thrones” cliffhanger was a different story, he said, especially since some cast members spent the ensuing months dropping false hints for viewers.
“That was full-on manipulation,” Gregg said with a laugh. “That was just lying.”
Although Netflix has encouraged the binge-watching trend, in which viewers race through a series and then have to wait many months until the next batch of episodes — or about a year in the case of “House of Cards” — cliffhangers are still frequently used by the creators of the streaming service’s original series.
Season 1 of “Bloodline,” a dark family drama with an ensemble cast including Kyle Chandler, Ben Mendelsohn, Linda Cardellini and Sissy Spacek, ended with a major plot point being seemingly tied up — before a new character emerged in the final scene.
The second season leaves viewers with an even bigger cliffhanger, with several characters facing a dramatic upheaval in their final scenes.
Chandler admits he feels for binge-watching fans who blitz a series and are left with nothing but questions.
“Now it’s really enhanced in that you have people watching 10, 12, 13 hours of TV straight,” Chandler said. “They have no sleep, they’re up in the middle of the night, they watch the 13th episode of something and it’s a cliffhanger? I mean that’s brutal. That’s tough.”