12 Monkeys. The kids were down a well, IIRC.
Here’s a crossover with the “good use of commercial breaks in a TV show thread”: In an episode of Buffy, Cordelia falls onto a piece of rebar and is impaled through the chest.
COMMERCIAL BREAK
After the break, Buffy & Willow are walking away from a funeral in a cemetery talking about the usual stuff and end up talking about how Cordelia’s fine; they just hang out in cemeteries because Sunnydale.
…pining for the fjords.
In Thursday’s Child by Noel Streatfeild…
The children who ran away from the cruel orphanage aren’t drowned, even though one of their nightshirts was found in a river. They are hiding on a boat.
In A Drowned Maiden’s Hair by Laura Amy Schlitz…
Maud isn’t dead of smoke inhalation or burns, even though she was left to die in a burning house. She was able to force her way out of the piece of furniture she was trapped in and got out of the house, but everyone had left by this point, and she spent the night on the beach.