Spoilers "Superman & Lois" Season 3

I'm not sure I would've still married her.

 

My wife is a Beatles fan. Didn't know that when we met. Lucked out.

 

Thank goodness!

 

She has many redeeming qualities that more than make up for this one shortcoming (and I have plenty of shortcomings of my own she graciously chooses to tolerate, so I’d say I got the better deal).

 

I totally get that. I often can't imagine who else would have my hubby or I!

 

Let’s just hope the season finale doesn’t end with a baby on the door step

Superman & Lois Season 3 Ends on a Cliffhanger Despite No Word on Season 4 Renewal

 

That's infuriating. As far as I'm concerned, showrunners who do a cliffhanger on a dicey renewal don't care about their core audience. Doing a cliffhanger will not get your show renewed, it'll only hurt the people who actually care.

 

To be clear, though, Brad Schwartz only said it has "a bit of a cliffhanger." It's important not to read too much into that. He probably meant something like the end of season 1, where the story arc of the season was fully resolved, but then Natalie showed up at the end to leave a hook for season 2. I wouldn't even call that a cliffhanger, more just a teaser.

That's grossly unfair. Of course they care; they wouldn't do such a hard, thankless job if they didn't care. And it's because they care about giving the audience another season that they take the risk of a cliffhanger ending, since giving a season a clean ending can make it easier for the network to decide to cancel it. Yes, it's a gamble, but people don't gamble because they don't care about what they're gambling for. They do it because they believe the potential payoff is worth the risk.

Also, the ending is not the only thing that matters in a story. The journey is more important than the destination. Sometimes producers feel the potential benefit of giving the audience a longer journey is worth the risk of denying them a destination. Sometimes it pays off, sometimes it doesn't. But they take the gamble because they do care. Not just about the audience, but about the hundreds of people who get gainful employment from working on the show and will be out of a job if it gets cancelled. They need to do everything they can to maximize their chances of keeping all those people employed, even if it's a risk to the audience's ephemeral enjoyment of a work of make-believe.

Again, though, there's no reason to expect a real "cliffhanger" here, despite the clickbait headline.

 

Is it? That's a shame, 'cause I stand by it.

 

That's not true at all.

 

Does that actually work though? Like has any show actually been renewed because the network was concerned about cancelling it without closure?

 

While it wasn't renewed for a new season, one could argue that Farscape qualifies. The Peacekeeper Wars miniseries was basically a Sci-Fi Channel apology to fans after they cancelled Farscape on the absolutely brutal S4 cliffhanger.

 

I tried Googling for "Shows renewed because of cliffhanger" and "Shows saved by cliffhanger," but all I got were dozens of articles about shows cancelled on cliffhangers. Google has become a virtually useless search engine, assuming we're all idiots who don't know what we're saying and giving us the most popular results that vaguely resemble what we're asking for, instead of what we're explicitly asking for.

Still, I think there must be cases where ending on a cliffhanger helped a show get renewed, or else why would anyone believe it was worth trying? A lot of the time, shows are on the bubble; the network is willing to renew them but has to be convinced it will be profitable enough. A show that ends on a cliffhanger is more likely to motivate viewers to come back, whereas a conclusive ending gives them a clean break they might walk away from. So if a show's fate is teetering on the edge, anything that makes it look even slightly more profitable could make the difference.

 

Legends of Tomorrow added a cliffhanger to try and get renewed. It didn't work.

Luckily if you stop watching a few minutes before the end of the second-last episode it basically works as a ending.

 

Really? Normally that works just great

Sincerely,
Alf
Twin Peaks
Mork and Mindy
Lois and Clark
Sliders
Carnivale
Invasion
Agent Carter
Pushing Daisies
Utopia
Santa Clarita Diet
the Midnight Club

 

Beyond that, it can hurt future video sales, streams,, etc., because people will be unwilling to buy an unfinished work.

On a related note, I've pretty much given up even starting any new Netflix or Prime genre shows unless and until the entire series is concluded because I simply don't trust them to not cancel it mid-storyline.

 

That wasn't the question. Naturally there are going to be individual cases where a gamble doesn't work, but the question is whether it's ever worked. The whole reason it's a gamble is because it often fails. But everything in TV is a gamble. No show, and no attempt to save a show, is guaranteed to succeed. The odds are always against it. Failure is always more likely than success. That's exactly why TV producers have to use every trick at their disposal to try to stay on the air.

 

Let's just remember this cliffhanger is because the CW network is for sale and new investors might not want to air certain CW shows/take it off the market.

 

To be fair, if it was successful at some point we might not actually know that was why. Personally, I find it hard to imagine network exec types and shareholders would be too concerned about such things. I suppose at some point it might affect the bottom line such as I've heard people say at times they won't even watch a show on Netflix because they're tire of them being cut short.