8 Most Cowardly Times TV Writers Copped Out

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Cliffhangers are as constant as the Northern Star on television. It’s not really a surprise – they offer writers an extremely effective way of keeping their audience captivated. If you’ve seen your favourite character forced into a seemingly-impossible situation come episode close, you’re going to want to see how it turns out. After all, the usual rule is that protagonists don’t tend to die no matter the odds.

So when a scriptwriter puts a character on the chopping block, you’re naturally intrigued. Unless the show’s Spooks – at which point you accept it as a natural development and debate how exactly that poor unfortunate soul is going to bite the dust – hinting at a character’s imminent demise is big news, and treated as such by the writers and the audience. Even when the character sucks, their departure’s guaranteed to make waves on the show.

Ditto with game-changing revelations. It’s not in a TV show’s nature to stand still, but they usually guard against truly transformative plot developments under the logic of if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. So when a show does dramatically shuffle the deck, it’s only natural that interest gets piqued. How will they move on from this groundbreaking news? What will be the repercussions of what’s happened? There’s a million questions to be answered, but one thing’s for certain – the landscape has irrevocably changed.

Or has it? Much as we’d love for our favourite shows to stay consistently awesome, sometimes the writers put themselves in a hole when constructing the perfect cliffhanger. Sadly, some inescapable cliff-hangers prove even inescapable for the writer, but unlike the average, confused viewer, the guy with the pen has a unique power – they can bend the rules to get themselves out of a jam. Sometimes it’s utterly brazen, and other times the writer just thinks they’re being really goddamned clever. Yet either way up, the audience is left feeling confused and gutted at the cheap solution offered up.

So with that in mind, I’ve compiled a list of the eight cheapest writer cop-outs in TV history. Read on, and find out more. It’ll probably p*ss you off.

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