Please wrap up a storyline in the first season unless you are guaranteed more seasons.
Write one solid season of a TV show and you’re awesome. You can have bonus mysteries to carry on. That’s really fun to have but quit writing cliffhangers when you don’t know if you’re coming back for a second season! It’s frustrating to your audience.
When I hear a show is good, but has a cliffhangers, I won’t watch until another season is greenlit. Why would I read half a book?
Writers (myself included) rely too heavily on cliffhangers as a function, but if you’re going to have one, the payoff better be good. Audiences are fatigued from cliffhangers that never resolve.
Firefly persists because it told great stories about well-written characters in a world we wanted to know more about, not for a cliffhanger.
You can write something people will talk about without it being open-ended in every episode and season of the show. It’s possible. We’ve seen it for years and it works more often than not.
If you want to be a show that people talk about for years, write a finished story and wow us all in the first season. Win our trust.
Television channels drop shows all the time. I’d rather be bummed that I lost a good show than angry you never finished (and angry at you, not the network).
Sincerely,
Brian Russell
Lover of Scripted TV
(This is a slightly modified post made from a recent Twitter rant of mine, but I wanted it to be somewhere more permanent.)