Low Culture: Breaking Bad plays with dangerous cliffhangers

I'm a big fan of watching something before going to sleep. For some strange reason, consuming that form of entertainment is just that much easier than reading or listening to music. But recently, as I've been watching Breaking Bad — a show about a chemistry teacher that starts manufacturing meth in order to support his family — it keeps me up all night.

There I was, waiting to go to sleep, when I started thinking about why I could sleep to Community or 30 Rock, but Breaking Bad kept me up. And the answer revolved around the use of cliffhangers. Now, BB not withstanding, there's been a subtle but powerful awakening in the cliffhanger in terms of television, and it's only come out in the last 15 years. So, let's do a little history.

Strangely enough, cliffhangers in television date back to soap operas. They were used in serial movies before TV was invented, but, for the next 40 years, we don't see much of them. Classic TV from I Love Lucy right up to Seinfeld steered away from continuity in general, so cliffhangers were much less common. Soap operas, however, began the practice extensively in the ‘80s (following the success of continuity in comics in the ‘70s), when they started linking seasons with suspensful plot twists. This was a cheap ploy to keep a series going; you can't end on a cliffhanger, and ratings tended to bump when one was used. Well, one savvy network executive took that concept and ran.

His name was J.J. Abrahms. Now, he's a producer, but Lost definitely changed the game in those terms. Most shows want to be self-contained (after all, every episode is someone's first) but also want to reward more complex and intelligent viewers with intelligent stories. Cliffhangers tend to symbolize that. Forgive my intrusion into theory, but storytelling is all about life. We're watching lives play out and unlike stories, lives don't have beginnings, middles and ends. They have plot, but it's all going on at the same time as other plots, and they rarely collect neatly at the end. It can be jarring and unfulfilling when stories do wrap up like a Christmas present, and cliffhangers combat that. They prove that stories begin and end fluidly, that big, life-changing moments happen, spinning situations into new directions (we like to call those "plot points"). And, man, did Lost love to do all those things.

But here's where cliffhangers fall off. Life has its plot twists: someone you love dies, you lose your job, your husband cheats on you, your son does drugs, I could go on and on. The point is they happen, but how often? How many plot twists do we experience in 80 years of life? Well, less than one season of Lost would be my guess. Stories are made of peaks and valleys, and the big moments have meaning because the smaller ones don't. There's a baseline of comfort, and plot twists are uncomfortable. That's the nature of the beast. If you keep using them, the comfort goes away. We're not riding a roller coaster anymore, we're just ratcheting up and up until the anticipation for the drop goes away, and we're just bored.

Well, what does this have to do with Breaking Bad? Two things: first, it's probably the best use of cliffhangers in modern television. Second, it's the reason I can't go to sleep to it. A proper cliffhanger should leave you wondering. All the between-season-gossip is a cliffhanger done right. And the best aggregate for testing that is to ask "Where can they go from here?" If the audience struggles for an answer, then it's a good cliffhanger. But plenty of shows do that, so what makes BB special? It solves the aforementioned problem ingeniously. Drug dealing is pretty suspenseful as it is. There's always the threat of getting caught, and when you're a mild-mannered teacher doing it, without the backup of a big gang and all the gangbangers therein, there's a ton of suspense. But the kicker is his family. By adding that simple piece, BB adds an entirely different layer of suspense. This entire show is about the massive, intricate construction of a lie and how long Walter can keep that lie afloat. So, having a cliffhanger every other episode for them is routine. And it feels like a natural part of the world without breaking my ability to handle 14 plot twist seasons.