The Following

The Bloody Margins of Network Television

There’s a moment near the beginning of *The Following* pilot that lets you know how rough the ride will be. Kevin Bacon, as the damaged ex-FBI agent Ryan Hardy, calmly pours vodka into a water bottle. It’s not original—retired cop dragged back for “one last job” is TV shorthand. Still, Bacon’s movements sell it. He doesn’t swagger; he moves like someone whose every joint aches. His shoulders slump, his eyes are sunken, and he looks like a man who survived hell only to find the world around him barely tolerable.

Fox launched the show in 2013, at the moment broadcast networks were scrambling to match cable’s edgier, bloodier fare. Creator Kevin Williamson, who made a career teasing out horror tropes in *Scream*, dove into a serialized cat-and-mouse thriller. The setup grabs you: Joe Carroll (James Purefoy), a charming literature professor and confessed killer of 14 women, escapes prison after a decade of cultivating a devoted cult of murderers on the outside.



Here’s the snag. The show wraps its gore in a Poe-themed aesthetic. They scrawl “Nevermore,” they quote “The Raven,” they go digging for eyeballs in homage to “The Tell-Tale Heart.” It all feels like the writers skimmed a high school anthology and stopped there. As Carolyn Kellogg pointed out in the *Los Angeles Times*, “This is not very Poe-ish at all.” The literary angle is thin decoration for slicing people open on network time slots.

Still, despite the faux-intellectual gloss and the FBI that loses suspects with comedic regularity, I couldn’t stop watching. There’s a relentless, pulpy energy to the whole thing.



Look at Hardy and Carroll’s interrogations. Williamson stages them like two ex-lovers bickering over custody, not the measured process of real investigations. Purefoy leans into a theatrical British flair, making Carroll smug in a way that irritates on purpose. But Bacon keeps everything grounded. This was his first time leading a network drama, and he brought a filmic seriousness to the procedural chaos. When they square off, his jaw tightens, his voice stays low. The backstory—Carroll stabbing him in a flashback, damaging his heart so badly he needs a pacemaker, a literal nod to “Tell-Tale Heart”—keeps Hardy’s vulnerability visible. He’s a hero who might actually drop from a heart attack mid-chase.

The show ran three seasons with 45 episodes of escalating, often overwhelming violence. By the time it fully leans into absurdity—cult members hiding out in suburban sleeper cells—you either surrender to the madness or you tune out.



Whether that’s a problem or the point depends on how much televised cruelty you can stomach. *The Following* doesn’t claim the psychological richness of prestige dramas, and it isn’t trying to. It’s a blunt force show. But there’s something to be said for a series that knows its own DNA. It’s a trashy, furious thriller that somehow snagged a bona fide movie star and convinced him to throw himself into the mess like his life depended on it.