Take this with a grain of salt and a whole lot of pepper: TV cliffhangers don’t work in the streaming era.

Maybe they do once in a while. I can’t think of any off the top of my head. My colleague Michael Phillips recently singled out the ending of “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” as an exception to the rule, and movie audiences can be fairly certain another installment will turn up in theaters.

When it comes to streaming originals, that expectation is less assured.

I happen to like a narrative that unfolds, beginning to end, with some economy. Wrap it up, I say! I want off this narrative treadmill! But Hollywood isn’t in the business of telling a satisfying story over the course of a single episode anymore. Serialization remains ascendant and streaming shows are defined by their season-long (sometimes series-long) story arcs.

If you’re lucky, those seasons end with some semblance of resolution.

Often, they don’t.

So what purpose does a cliffhanger serve if you don’t know when a show will return — or if it will return at all?

A sendup of our collective fascination with true crime, the dark comedy “Based on a True Story” premiered on Peacock last week and it is the latest series to fall into this trap. A couple discovers the identity of a serial killer and, rather than turning him in to the cops, they decide to make a podcast with him instead. Their safety remains in question throughout and the season ends on a cliffhanger — with no guarantee of a series renewal.

Cliffhangers are supposed to function as a promise of answers to come. You want a general idea of when that will be. In the streaming era, it could be anyone’s guess, and that sense of excitement from a cliffhanger dissipates over time. Instead of leaving an audience on tenterhooks, we’re left only to shrug. How anticlimactic!

Meanwhile, some streaming shows have ended their seasons on a cliffhanger, only to be canceled altogether, leaving audiences dangling forever. Who wants that?

Project by project, it’s unclear who’s pushing for cliffhangers. Is the showrunner? Or the executives to whom they answer? Or maybe cliffhangers are the inevitable result of untenable working conditions, with shrinking budgets reducing the creative process down to “mini-rooms” with four or five people mapping out an entire show in a matter of weeks.

A staple in fiction since at least the 19th century, when novels were serialized in magazines, cliffhangers were once primarily the hallmark of daytime soaps. But it was the nighttime soap “Dallas” that upped the ante with one of the most famous cliffhangers in TV history.

In the spring of 1980, the show’s third season ended with Larry Hagman’s egocentric oil baron J.R. Ewing gunned down. But who pulled the trigger? To promote the upcoming season, CBS created the catchphrase “Who shot J.R.?” — ingenious for its simplicity — and it became a shorthand for all cliffhangers that have dangled since.

Cliffhangers worked pretty well when shows followed a standard TV schedule, and new seasons launched in the fall and wrapped in the spring. A cliffhanger in May meant you’d be getting some answers come September. That felt like an honest pact between a show and its audience.

Streaming has upended all of that. Maybe there’ll be another season. Maybe there won’t. Maybe a show will be renewed, only to be canceled before new episodes are filmed. Or maybe new episodes were filmed and ready to go, but the show was canceled anyway and then subsequently picked up by a different cable or streaming platform, and here’s hoping you subscribe to that one, too.

Uncertainty can thwart the emotional connection you form with the shows you like best — or even perfect average shows you’re merely happy to have back on a consistent basis. But “perfectly average” doesn’t have a place in the TV landscape right now. And the ongoing writers strike has meant more uncertainty than ever.

For all the convenience offered by streaming, there are intangibles we’ve lost by abandoning the old network model.

Last month on Twitter, Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker Amy Thurlow outlined some of those frustrations: Like a show? “Great, Season 2 will air a year and a half from now when the plot has become as memorable as what you had for breakfast last Friday. And maybe Season 2 does drop and you binge it all in two days. It was fun, but now it’s just a consumable. A sugar high. You aren’t sitting with the story week after week, letting it knock around in your head.”

Why bother getting invested, she asks, when there’s so little regularity?

Thurlow is hitting on something: A sense of regularity is missing in the streaming age.

The traditional network season — awash in cop shows and diminishing in quality by the year — still offers an external structure that does a lot of your thinking for you: New episodes will show up in this window. With streaming, that reliable calendar is gone. New seasons can drop any time. “I didn’t even know it was coming back,” is a persistent refrain because it’s unrealistic for most audiences to stay on top of so many unpredictable premiere dates.

Streaming favors the fire hose of new over the pleasures of the familiar and the regular, which means it’s harder than ever to remember which shows even exist.

Somebody recently asked: Does Apple TV+ have a marquee or signature show outside of “Ted Lasso”? My mind went blank. To jog my memory, I had to scan a list of Apple’s output, which does include some modestly buzzy shows such as “Shrinking,” “For All Mankind” and “Severance.”

It’s worth noting that after stalling its narrative engines over nine episodes, “Severance” ended its first season on a shamelessly cheap cliffhanger. The series premiered 16 months ago and was in the process of shooting Season 2 when the writers strike threw a wrench into things. Who knows when that long-awaited second season will arrive, but imagine if new episodes had started airing just three months later, following the old “Dallas” model. Now that would have kept things interesting.

Instead, streaming originals exist in these truncated, discrete pockets of time. And then poof, they’re gone and they might as well exist in limbo. A cliffhanger isn’t satisfying under those conditions, not in a way that generates real excitement and anticipation.

The original “Batman” series from the ‘60s relied on cliffhangers, but it did so with a promise of dependability: “Tune in tomorrow — same Bat-time, same Bat-channel.”

Streaming refuses to make it easy. Figure it out yourself.

See you next time.

Maybe.

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