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The Best…TV cliffhanger

Larry Hagman as JR Ewing
  • Posted at 11:05am
  • 17 August 2007
  • by DavidBrown-RT
  • 1 comment

A good cliffhanger should reward you for a year's devoted viewing and leave you salivating for a few months in anticipation of its outcome. Here is a top-five run-through of the TV moments that have kept us on the edge of our seats.

5) Dallas: A House Divided (1980)

When scheming oil supremo JR Ewing was shot full of holes, Dallas producers set the standard for end-of-season climaxes. Suspects included rival Cliff Barnes - played with all the menace of an indignant Daffy Duck - and permanently soused wife Sue Ellen. Turns out it was Bing Crosby's daughter who did it, but this act of trigger-pulling has spawned a wave of copycat crimes down the years, not least the attempted murder of baked-potato-face Phil Mitchell on EastEnders.

4) Friends: The One with Ross's Wedding (1998)

Sitcoms abroad usually have "stinker" written all over them: think One Foot in the Algarve and the Miami episodes of Only Fools and Horses. Yet despite the horrible stereotyping, Friends in London worked thanks to its killer pay-off. Ross says the wrong name at the altar, an out-of-place Helen Baxendale is dispatched back to Cold Feet, and the audience gets the whiff of reconciliation with Rachel. It was the greatest non-wedding of them all and the writers would keep us hanging on until 2004 to see how TV's most famous will they/won't they couple would end up.

3) 24: Season one, 11.00pm-12.00am (2002)

Nobody is safe. That was the lesson to be learned by the death of Jack Bauer's wife Teri at the hands of CTU mole Nina Myers in the closing seconds of the terrorist-bashing drama's inaugural season. Fans were split between sorrow for Bauer's loss and joy that we would never have to see that dreaded oversized cardigan again. Ritual slaughter of series regulars has continued ever since with George Mason and David Palmer among the casualties, while writers on Lost and Heroes have followed its lead by bumping off cast members with alacrity.

2) Star Trek: the Next Generation: The Best of Both Worlds (1990)

When the malevolent cybernetic Borg kidnapped Captain Jean-Luc Picard and assimilated him into their collective, cardboard cut-out Will Riker came into his own and opened fire on his commanding officer. It was the moment the Trek spin-off stepped out from behind the shadow of William Shatner's toupee, packing even more emotional wallop than Spock's sacrifice at the end of The Wrath of Khan. The only trouble being that the genuinely eerie Borg would come to be robbed of their menace through overuse as an end-of-season standby on future incarnation Voyager.

1) The West Wing: Two Cathedrals (2001)

In writer Aaron Sorkin's tribute to faith, a jaded President Jed Bartlet renounces God as a "feckless thug" at the funeral of his beloved secretary Mrs Landingham, is re-baptised in a Washington storm, marches saturated to a press conference flanked by his advisors and a Dire Straits soundtrack, and leaves viewers dangling over whether he'll be seeking a second term. When Chief of Staff Leo McGarry anxiously murmurs "watch this" to fellow staffers, he has no need to worry that the audience at home will have turned away from the screen. TV (and politics) doesn't come more goose-pimply than this.

What are your top TV cliffhangers? Post a comment now.

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  • Posted on 17 October 2007
  • at 7:56pm
  • by Perspicador

Neighbours has just come close, as viewed in this country, with a mini-bus crash, and viewers left up in the air wondering how it will all land up. It is followed by a near-catastrophic vehicle explosion and someone in intensive care having cardiac arrest... now it wouldn't do to save the outcome for months on end, would it?

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