To Be DIScontinued! - The Hall of Unresolved TV Cliffhangers
"As they say at the Buttery, I'm ready to take your order; what will it be?" -- Captain Victor Comstock to radio writer Betty Roberts, the final line of Remember WENN's final ep. For more of these quotes, click here.
"How can they do this - ending a cancelled series with a 'to be continued' - we'll never know what happen to Cybill & Mary-Anne! :(" -- Paul Hyett, British fan of Cybill.
"Cliffhangers (...) are rip-offs. You end up spending three months waiting for the plot to resolve itself, and it's almost always disappointing. And some times, it's an extra special rip-off. Because, as Joss Whedon knows, sometimes shows don't come back. You see, there's this little phenomenon called cancellation, and it happens to the best of shows." -- Jason Snell on 'hangers. For the "full" article it came from, see below.


Introduction
Season ending cliffhangers have been part of television since 1977, when Robert Urich's character, a tennis player, got shot on "Soap". Although they didn't go big until JR Ewing, played by Larry Hagman, got shot on "Dallas" in 1980... the resolution on 20 November that year had 36.3 million viewers or 53.3%, according to the World Almanac. (By the way, it was Chester Tate, played by Robert Mandan, who killed the tennis player, and it was Kristin Shephard, played by Mary Crosby, who shot JR.) The idea of the season enders was to delay the resolution for, say, 3 months while the show was on summer hiatus, unlike, say 2 weeks for a during-the-season cliffhanger. (It also makes for a dramatic start to the new season... even when you're doing a sitcom.)
However there's a disadvantage of season ending cliffhangers... the network can always cancel the show and thus preventing a cliffhanger from being resolved. This is the purpose of the page: to list those cliffhangers that left us, the viewers, hanging only for us to be left with no resolution.
Rules, and how to give feedback
There's really only one rule: All that's needed to be included on this page is a cliffhanger in the final aired ep. Of course, this distinction gets blurred a bit sometimes when an ep was made last, but not aired last (like Two of a Kind). Also, a few 'hangers are bound to slip in even though they have been resolved, although not in the context of the series (e.g., Dallas, whose 'hanger was resolved in a TV movie). I'll count them. But there are two ways of giving me feedback: by email, and via this polling form (which ends up in my email anyway).
Resources... not that there's much


OK, had enough? Then click on a link to start your journey. (I'm not a keen fan of frames myself, but if you want frames for easier navigation, then click here.)

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For more from yours truly, check out these:
For more storylines cut off by networks, click here for The Gilligan's Syndrome Page.
Or maybe you'd like some TV cliches? Check out The Big Fat List Of TV Cliches.
Also, visit the page that (kind of) started it all... a site devoted to the somewhat lesser-known WB cartoon Road Rovers (it also has links to the other pages I've made).