You see a man putting a bag under a table. Two man arrive, sitting at the table, you wait for the bomb to explode because the bag must have a meaning. The meeting ends, the men stand up, one is killed by headshot.

And your scene depends on the characters. Is one the main character? Highly unlikely he get killed.

It's even worse if it's a TV series. Main character is strapped to a bomb? No problem. Guest star is strapped to a bomb? Might get killed. Unknown supporting role strapped to a bomb? Sure death. I think that was part of GoT's success. Surprise deaths. And nudity of course.

If everything has a meaning even the chosen actor is important. Known actor in a minor role? Surely gets important.

That is interesting, I hadn’t thought of that before.

I think a recent series which bucked this trend was For All Mankind. Rather than building suspense, bad stuff just happened with no warning. And it wasn’t a jump scare, it just happened. The entertainment for me then came from the characters reactions and how the plot then unfolded.

I actually class it as one of the best shows I’ve seen. I feel it managed to be very wholesome while also having some major emotional highs and lows. In particular, it didn’t build drama just for the sake of keeping the audience engaged.

I could talk about that show for ages.

Inglorious Basterds does this very well, its opening scene is very close to what you describe, as well as a number of other scenes in the film.

A great example of this is a scene in the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy. Before the scene starts the narrator explains, in detail, what exactly will happen in the scene, and what the end result will be. None of this makes the scene itself any less thrilling.

What's interesting about this example in particular is when the theory building occurs: before or after.

Nobody is surprised, then subsequently asks no questions. The questions simply come after.

And so I imagine the sequence of when you want the viewer to ask their questions can be used as a literary device (famously, in media res).

I don't but that one is better than the other: you surely need both for a good story.

yet in OPs example, the "surprise" consists of a threat not being enactioned, therefore it is an instrument of suspense

Chekhov wrote short stories and plays. It is harder to apply the same principle to serialized narratives like tv-shows and comics, since you don't know how everything pans out and you cant go back and edit.

"Chronicle of a Death Foretold", by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, for people unfamiliar. It’s a very good short book.

This reminded me of a particularly grisly character introduction in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. It's played to the opposite effect where it's not going to be a surprise at all. It's hardly even suspenseful, but hangs another helping of dread over the story.

> Toadvine glanced at the man's forehead but the man's hat was pushed down almost to his eyes. The man smiled and forked the hat back slightly with his thumb. The print of the hatband lay on his forehead like a scar but there was no mark other. Only on the inside of his lower arm was there tattooed a number which Toadvine would see in a Chihuahua bathhouse and again when he would cut down the man's torso where it hung skewered by its heels from a treelimb in the wastes of Pimeria Alta in the fall of that year.

It's not really the gun on the wall, the bread knife, or the tattoo. It's the narrator revealing a kind of untrustworthy omniscience by spoiling future details of the story.

This is thoroughly ridiculed in A Series of Unfortunate Events (the Netflix TV series and presumably also the books that they're based on). (Mild spoiler alert) The bank manager has a noticeable cough the whole way through. If anything it gets worse and other characters comment on it, and it seems for sure that it will be a plot point. Of course, it ultimately comes to nothing.