The turn between acts - in TV, the cliffhanger before the commercial.
An act break is a point of no return: a decision or reversal that closes one movement and forces the next. In features they're structural (often invisible on screen); in broadcast television they're physical - the out before the ad break, engineered so the audience returns.
TV writers 'break' a story by finding its act breaks first: get the outs right and the scenes between them mostly place themselves.
Go deeper: TV Episode (A/B/C Story Structure) - beat sheet
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