Cliffhangers! (1979)

Debuting February 27, 1979. NBC 8/7pm Central 

Cliffhangers! Three continuing action-packed stories in one show!
First, The Secret Empire. Marshal Jim Donner rides out of the past right into the future and discovers a secret city beneath the earth filled with wonders and packed with thrills far beyond the dreams of mortal men. A city ruled by an evil emperor whose one goal is to control all mankind.
Next; a beautiful newspaper reporter travels the globe to uncover a plot which will end the world; but when this ring of master spies finds she’s hot on their trail, all they want to do is Stop Susan Williams.
Then, it’s Dracula 79! The Prince of Darkness has returned to cast his spell upon the unwary…but the evil count will never rest in peace for Kurt and Mary have sworn to end his immortal reign. Can goodness triumph or will Dracula rule the day?
Watch Tuesday on NBC! They don’t call them Cliffhangers for nothing!

That announcement by Don Pardo introduced this unique one-hour series to viewers via network promos. Cliffhangers! was an attempt by TV creator Kenneth Johnson to resurrect the thrilling movie serials of yesteryear in a TV format. Movie serials used to play before a feature presentation at movie theaters in the 1930s and 1940s. Divided into chapters, the idea was that audiences would return the following week to see the next chapter of the serial, which traditionally ended with the main character in a perilous situation with little apparent chance of escape. This made a lot of sense in a pre-television America where some 60-80 million patrons attended the movies each week, even during the Depression. Borrowing from the source material, each hour-long episode of Cliffhangers! was divided into three 20-minute segments that each featured cliffhanger endings and an insane amount of expository narration by none other than Brad Crandall.

Stop Susan Williams was an adventure drama in the style of The Perils of Pauline, a movie serial from 1914 which had numerous sequels and remakes over the decades including a 1933 serial and a 1947 feature film. Susan Anton starred as Susan Williams, a newspaper photographer investigating the death of her brother Alan, also a reporter, who she believes was murdered because he was about to expose an international conspiracy. The villains were led by Anthony Korf, played by Albert Paulsen, and his henchman Gold Tooth, played by John Hancock, who attempted to kill Susan in almost every episode. Ray Walston played Bob Richards, Susan’s editor, and Marj Dusay played Jennifer Selden, the newspaper’s owner. Michael Swan played Jack Schoengarth, an old friend of Susan’s brother who assists in her search.

The episodes of Stop Susan Williams were intentionally far-fetched, with many clichés, as Susan traveled the world from Marrakesh to Nairobi to Switzerland. She faced dangers such as cobra bites, a lion pit, going over a cliff in a sidecar, and, in the final episode, being trapped in a mineshaft with a nuclear bomb. Though Cliffhangers being taken off the air prevented viewers from seeing the conclusion, footage shot for the series but not aired on NBC was included in a re-edited movie version titled The Girl Who Saved the World.

“Don’t touch that dial! It’s time for Chapter 4 of The Secret Empire, portions of which are in beautiful black-and-white!”

The Secret Empire was a science fiction/Western serial set in Wyoming in the 1880s. Marshal Jim Donner (Geoffrey Scott) investigates gold shipment thefts by Phantom Riders when he finds the underground kingdom of Chimera. The residents of Chimera were aliens controlled by the evil Emperor Thorval (Mark Lenard), who uses a mind-enslaving device called the ‘Compliatron’ powered by stolen gold. Thorval’s daughter, the seductive Princess Tara (Diane Markoff, later Stephanie Kramer) also featured in plots, while the Partisans were Chimeran resistance fighters led by Roe (Peter Tomarken) and Maya (Pamela Brull).

Scenes in the Old West were filmed in black and white (or really, sepia tone), while scenes in the underground Chimera were in color. Laser sound effects were directly lifted from Battlestar Galactica, and the model used for Buck Rogers’ Ranger 3 was also seen (which made sense, because all three were produced by Universal Television). The segment was clearly inspired by the 1935 Gene Autry serial The Phantom Empire that featured Thunder Riders and a subterranean alien city called Murania where the queen faced a revolution. 

“Now stay tuned for this week’s chapter of The Curse of Dracula, following immediately.”

The Curse of Dracula was a horror-themed segment that tread on by-then familiar ground. Michael Nouri played Count Dracula as a 512-year-old vampire, now is working undercover as a professor of Eastern European history at South Bay College in San Francisco…teaching night classes, naturally. The story had Mary Gibbons (Carol Baxter) team up with Kurt Von Helsing (Stephen Johnson), the grandson of Dracula’s original nemesis to avenge her mother against Dracula. Their mission was to destroy all twenty of Dracula’s strategically located coffins so that Dracula will have no place to sleep during the day and thus succumb to daylight.

As the serial begins, thirteen of Dracula’s coffins have been destroyed, leaving him with seven resting places in the San Francisco area. His teaching position enabled him to prey on young students such as Antoinette (Antoinette Stella), Christine (Bever-Leigh Banfield) and Darryl (Mark Montgomery) – who could be turned and join Dracula’s undead army. This was arguably the best and most popular of the segments; in fact, by the third episode, Dracula was moved from the third segment to the first so that the episode could lead with its strongest story. Dracula gave us gothic romantic horror and a somewhat sympathetic portrayal of the vampire. The lack of the announcer introducing the story but instead being narrated by Dracula himself made this segment seem less campy and appear more serious in tone than the other two stories.

Still, a few humorous scenes were thrown in, one of which had Dracula get pulled over and asked for his driver’s license, resulting in a funny exchange with the police officer. Unlike the other segments of Cliffhangers, The Curse of Dracula was the only story that completed its run before the show was prematurely taken off the air.

“Can Susan, Jack, and Nicholai escape burial in an earthen tomb? Will Bob emerge with untold wealth at the sacrifice of countless lives? What does the future hold if the leaders of the world are truly doomed? All the answers lie in Chapter 12: Crypt of Disaster! The final chapter of…Stop Susan Williams!”

But U.S. viewers never saw that final episode…instead, NBC offered Sunn Classic Pictures’ take on “The Ten Commandments” in a Greatest Heroes of the Bible rerun. This was a rocky season for NBC. Fred Silverman had just been hired to head the network in the summer of 1978, when it was struggling with only a few successful series. In fact, half of NBC’s fall 1978 prime time shows had been canceled by mid-season due to no fault by Silverman, since the fall season had been set and well in production when he came on board. Cliffhangers! was thus among nine mid-season replacement shows greenlit by Silverman in an attempt to improve NBC’s performance. Silverman is said to have cast Susan Anton, and the network her do a number of public appearances to publicize the show. Cliffhangers! was also heavily promoted in network promos and print ads, and there seemed to be significant viewer awareness of the show.

As explained at the time by Susan Anton to the press, “the series is structured to last only 10 weeks…. that’s the beauty of the series. After that, if we’re a hit, we can be brought back for another go-round. Or they can bring in other 10-week episodes.” Popular segments could even be spun off into their own series, or replaced with others, keeping the show fresh with new segments to interest viewers. Talented writers were brought on to work on the show, including Harry and Renee Longstreet, Craig Buck, Thomas E. Szollosi, Richard Christian Matheson, David Carren, and Jeri Taylor.

One gimmick used on Cliffhangers! was that all three series started with different chapter numbers to add to the “in-progress” feeling. Stop Susan Williams began at Chapter 2, The Secret Empire started with Chapter 3, and The Curse of Dracula with Chapter 6. The show was also incredibly expensive to produce due to the need for three simultaneous production units. It had a reported budget of $1 million per episode, possibly the first TV series to reach this total. Watching it now, it is extremely hard to fathom this series costing as much to produce in late 1978 as Star Trek: The Next Generation cost to produce nine years later. In fact, due to opening narrations, extensive chapter recaps, and a long tease for the following week, at most each segment seemed to have 12 minutes of new footage by my estimate.

The cliffhanger endings themselves were often tired and contrived. For example, a hero would be shown experiencing a car crash, then in the next chapter he was shown jumping out of the door at the last minute. Or the hero is attacked by a menacing creature at the end of a chapter, and then at the beginning of the next, he finds it to be a harmless pet. Of course, these elements were directly lifted from the 1930s/40s serials. Really, it was a storytelling format that was several decades out of style, and was not the hit Fred Silverman was hoping for (nor was Supertrain, but that’s another story). Although complemented by some critics as an original concept for television, most also noted that the concept was too campy and repetitive to sustain viewer interest long term.

Airing Tuesdays opposite Happy Days/Laverne & Shirley (the two most popular shows in television at the time), Cliffhangers! finished the season 53rd out of 63 programs. The last episode aired on May 1, the day NBC announced its fall schedule, and Cliffhangers! was not on it. Taken off the air after only 10 episodes had aired, as mentioned only The Curse of Dracula had reached its conclusion, leaving viewers with unresolved…cliffhanger endings for the other two. However, the final 11th episode did air overseas, concluding the other two segments. American viewers later saw the concluding part of Stop Susan Williams when its eleven installments were re-edited into a single two-hour television movie, The Girl Who Saved the World. The Curse of Dracula was also re-edited into two television movies that used the titles Dracula ’79, The World of Dracula, and The Loves of Dracula.

Cliffhangers! was never rerun in the US or released to any form of home video, although bootleg recordings have floated around for decades that include that final episode that aired overseas. Sadly, these are multi-generation copies at this point, and the resulting video resolution makes it difficult to tell what is going on in the darker scenes. This show really begs for a DVD release (or even a Bluray, if original film elements exist), but the obscurity of what is now a series approaching 50 years old makes any such release unlikely.