IMO, streaming services should be banned from ending a series with a cliffhanger. We finally got around to watching Severance, two years after it first aired, and it ends with a bloody cliffhanger!
Very annoying, after you put in all that time – you feel like you've been cheated. There's still months to the second season release, and who's to say that won't also end with a cliffhanger? And there's always a danger of a cliffhanger show getting cancelled without a conclusion.
Rather than making me keen to continue, it's more likely to make me drop the series (which I did with Umbrella Academy and The Great after their first seasons ended with cliffhangers). Stop treating my time as unimportant, TV creators.
It’s formulaic & done purely for commercial reasons. Obviously they need to leave you with a reason to want to come back, but good characters & setting & an unfinished sub plot or hint of some new issue/crisis developing will be enough if it’s done well.
@Susan60 That's the thing, it doesn't work with streaming series because of the enormous delay. Better to conclude the story than have a teaser for the next season.
I wonder if it ends up losing people? They get so peeves that they abandon a series. Especially if you’ve binged it & have to wait forever for the next series.
@timrichards ungh yep. And this case was the first I came across where there was a bunch of AI generated nonsense content that claimed s3 was booked and coming soon when in fact it was cancelled after the first. Thought we’d gone mad for months.
The use of cliffhangers feels like part of the endless prodding by social media and streaming services to get you to use their services more. All of which I find intensely annoying. One of the best things about Mastodon is its lack of manipulative algorithms always wanting you to spend more time here. ✅
@timrichards It’s true. We don’t give it enough credit I think. I often get to a place where I say to myself, “That’s it. You read them all. Go do something else.”
@davidtoddmccarty And it's a delight not waking up to a renewed burst of activity around a mildly contentious post I wrote yesterday (which used to happen all the time at Twitter).
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