2013 - 2015
The Following arrived on Fox in January 2013 and ran for three seasons and 45 episodes before the network cancelled it in 2015. Kevin Williamson created it. If that name sounds familiar, it should. This is the man who wrote Scream, co-created Dawson's Creek, and spent most of the 90s teaching horror to flirt with its own conventions. The Following was his swing at prestige-adjacent network television in an era where Dexter had already proven audiences would sit through eight seasons of a serial killer if the lead was charming enough.
Kevin Bacon plays Ryan Hardy, a former FBI agent hauled out of enforced retirement when Joe Carroll, the literature professor turned killer he put away years earlier, escapes death row. James Purefoy plays Joe Carroll. That casting is the engine of the whole show. Purefoy is a British actor with a voice like single malt and an unnerving ability to recite Edgar Allan Poe between acts of violence. The premise is that Carroll spent his prison years building a network. A cult. The Followers: devotees who took his gospel of literary horror and turned it into an operational death squad pointed wherever he wanted.
That is the machine the pilot sets in motion. Hardy hunts. Carroll pulls strings from somewhere he should not be able to pull strings from. Bodies pile up. And the show keeps escalating for three seasons until the network pulled the plug.
Bacon is the reason this thing held together as long as it did. His Ryan Hardy is broken goods held together by a pacemaker and bourbon, and Bacon underplays everything when the scripts around him are going full operatic. He is a movie star slumming on network television and he treats every scene like it matters. It shows.
Purefoy is his match. Joe Carroll is the kind of villain role that asks an actor to be charming, monstrous, well-read, and occasionally ridiculous, all in the same scene, and Purefoy finds the register. He had just come off Rome when he took this, and you can feel that Shakespearean-trained swagger in every Poe recitation.
Key players across the three seasons:
Jessica Stroup
Max Hardy
Annie Parisse
Debra Parker
Kevin Bacon
Ryan Hardy
Michael Ealy
Theo Noble
Shawn Ashmore
Mike Weston
Nico Tortorella
Jacob Wells
Sam Underwood
Mark and Luke Gray
Valorie Curry
Emma Hill
That is a deep bench for a network thriller. The show rarely had a casting problem. What it had was a volume problem.
The surface read is that this is a cat-and-mouse thriller about a cop and a killer. The deeper read is more interesting. The Following is a show about the romanticisation of violence, the celebrity serial killer, and what happens when pop culture turns its worst figures into brand ambassadors. Joe Carroll's cult exists because people watched his trial and decided they wanted in. He is a TED Talk with a knife. The show knows this and keeps poking at it, asking whether Hardy's own obsession with Carroll is all that different from the Followers' obsession with him.
Edgar Allan Poe is the literary skeleton. Carroll's murders quote Poe. The kills are staged as tableau. The cult reads "The Masque of the Red Death" the way other cults read scripture. It gives the show a visual identity that a by-the-numbers serial-killer procedural would never have, and when it works it is genuinely unsettling.
The problem is that the escalation logic of network television in 2013 asked Williamson to top himself every week. By the middle of season two the show is leaning hard on torture, hostage stand-offs, and cult-attack set pieces, and the themes start to feel like window dressing on an increasingly nasty engine.
Visually the show commits. Cold blue-grey palette, rain-soaked Brooklyn exteriors, shadow-heavy interiors, candles everywhere once the Followers get involved. It looks more expensive than most 2013 network dramas looked. The score leans gothic and restrained and gives the Poe-obsessed corners of the show room to breathe.
It is also, to put it politely, grim. This is not a show you drop on in the background. There is a reason critics started bouncing off it by season two and a reason Parents Television Council spent most of its run filing complaints. The body count is enormous. The tone is humourless. If you want serial-killer content with some of Dexter's black comedy in the mix, look elsewhere. This is closer to the gothic horror end of the genre, closer in DNA to what Hannibal was doing on NBC the same year.
The pilot pulled strong numbers. 10 million viewers on first airing. Critics were split from the start, some praising Bacon and Purefoy, others already flagging the relentless sadism. By season two the conversation had turned. By season three the ratings had dropped enough that Fox pulled the trigger, and the finale aired as a cancellation rather than a planned ending, which shows.
Its real legacy is in what it proved about network television's appetite for cable-grade darkness in the early 2010s. The Following was Fox trying to book the kind of content that Dexter was doing on Showtime and that prestige cable had monopolised. It did not quite pull it off, and the burnout on its own premise is instructive. You cannot run a show about a charismatic killer and his cult for three seasons without either letting him win occasionally or watching the premise collapse.
For all the complaints I have about its second and third seasons, the first season of The Following is a genuinely gripping piece of television. Bacon is great. Purefoy is better. The Poe overlay gives it a texture that your standard Mindhunter-adjacent procedural does not have. If you enjoy dark cat-and-mouse thrillers in the True Detective or Homeland vein, and you can stomach the body count, the pilot and the opening run are worth your time.
The honest advice: watch season one. Decide from there whether you want the full ride. Williamson's original premise is sharper and meaner in the opening episodes than it is by the time the Followers are running out of victims. And Kevin Bacon, working at this level on network television, is a thing you will not see every day.
Connie Nielsen
Dr Karen Hennessy
James Purefoy
Joe Carroll
Adan Canto
Paul Torres
Natalie Zea
Claire Matthews
Kevin Williamson
Creator