I'll kick things off then.
Much as I love Falcon Crest, the actual cliffhanger for season 1 was really a bit lame, as the drama had already happened. Douglas dying occurred in the previous episode, and the finale was just a drawn out trial, even though Emma was fab.
Now Return To Eden I haven't fully watched since it first aired, but I just found it on youtube and saw the cliffhanger:
Wow, it is fabulously cheesy, love the guy with the James Brolin beard.... so I decided to go for:
MATCH 1 : Return To Eden S1 - proof if it be needed that every great cliffhanger needs at least one plane crash.
Now, Dallas S2 and Knots S4 had fairly muted cliffhangers that year in terms of sudden dramatic events, but both are still very memorable. In Dallas, it is not the car crash, or Cliff possibly being the babies father, but just us in the hospital with Bobby and JR wondering if Sue-Ellen amd John Ross will survive.
In Knots, Ciji had been murdered several episodes before, we already knew Diana was going to leave with Chip, the only dramatic event was Karen's athletic sprint back to her house to discover Diana had emptied her wardrobe and acutally gone.
But for me Knots has to win, I will always have a soft spot for that moving final sequence, beautifully filmed by David Jacobs, as we fade from Abby staring out to sea, to poor Val sitting in her armchair, to Gary fading to sepia behind bars. That one always lives on in the memory as a pivotal moment in Knots, when you felt nothing would ever be quite the same for our main characters again.
MATCH 2: Knots Landing S4