Crossing Jordan's"
Kring said "cliffhangers are fun to work to as a writing
group." In Sunday's cliffhanger Jordan (Jill Hennessy)
was accused of a murder that she may or may not have
committed. "Ours is more a paranoid nightmare, waking
up, not remembering what actually happened."
Kring has never had to
resort to the old-fashioned cliffhanger, where the
writers toss a bomb into a crowded scene and figure out
later who lives. But he does recall a disastrous
cliffhanger in the third season of "Crossing Jordan."
The season ended with Jordan's father, played by Ken
Howard, standing over a body with a gun in his hand. Two
weeks later, Kring found out Howard was not rehired.
Then the show was off the air for 10 months when
Hennessy was pregnant. Additionally NBC bounced it to a
new night, new timeslot. Because new viewers would have
been confused, "we chose to come back with a regular
episode," rather than pay off the cliffhanger. "Fans
were livid."
For producers,
"Cliffhangers do bring up a certain amount of anxiety,"
Kring said. The immediacy of TV is a problem. "Often you
find the world has changed in three months," Kring said.
"Something new has come along changing the way people
watch TV. Or the creators themselves change."
Despite their problems,
the cliffhangers keep coming. That's partly because they
still make ratings sense: "If you give the network
something high stakes, it's easier to promote..."
