Act Break

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.