Fox Brings Home the Bacon – As in Kevin – in ‘The Following’
Kevin Bacon has been on TV before, from soap operas as a young actor to telemovies as a mature one – but Fox’s The Following is his first turn as a series lead. And he’s excellent…
The Following premieres Monday, Jan. 21, at 9 p.m. ET, in what once would have been thought an unthinkably early hour to televise so violent a drama on broadcast network television. Then again, the violence depicted in The Following would have been unthinkable to broadcast, too.
The creator of The Following is Kevin Williamson, who captured the youth market with two hot franchises: the soapy prime-time TV drama Dawson’s Creek, and, as a screenplay writer of the first installment, the movie series Scream.
But Scream, a send-up of horror movies, played the conventions of that genre for laughs. The Following uses them just as liberally – the walks down dark hallways in empty houses, the propensity to put attractive young people in jeopardy, the maniacal murderers in masks – but, in every instance this time, is serious. Dead serious.
Bacon plays Ryan Hardy, a former FBI agent who went on disability eight years earlier after apprehending serial killer Joe Carroll (played by James Purefoy, below, right). Hardy stopped Carroll’s murder spree, but not before Carroll nearly murdered him, too. Hardy retired with a few deep scars, psychological as well as physical, and is a weary and alcohol-addicted soul when The Following begins.
The FBI contacts Hardy because Carroll has escaped from prison, and they want Hardy to consult with young agent Mike Weston (Shawn Ashmore) on the case and help recapture the devious Carroll – as well as his Charles Manson-ish gang of followers, who are willing, and eager, to carry on Carroll’s deadly tradition of committing grisly murders to honor Carroll’s literary idol, Edgar Allen Poe.
The Following deserves high points for its strong acting and its ambitious structure. Hardy and Carroll are well-matched adversaries, and the series eventually finds ways of having Bacon and Purefoy share many intense scenes together – think Silence of the Lambs as a weekly TV series. Bacon’s Hardy is very much in the same vein of haunted, obsessed TV protagonists as Kiefer Sutherland’s Jack Bauer in 24 and David Janssen’s Richard Kimble in The Fugitive– potent company indeed.
Purefoy has more than enough charisma to explain how he drew and captivated his twisted apostles, and the leading women in The Following grab you, too. That roster includes Maggie Grace from Lost as a surviving victim of Carroll’s, Natalie Zea (below, left) from Justified as Carroll’s ex-wife, and Valorie Curry as the nanny of the Carrolls’ young child.
The structure of the show is almost equally divided between the present-day hunt for Carroll and his cultish killers, and flashbacks from various points in the past eight years that illuminate characters and key moments since Carroll first shifted from passionate literature professor to multiple murderer. If you thought Lost had a lot of time-resetting flashbacks, wait till you see The Following.
And if you do see The Following, arrive with this advance warning. This show is very violent, and not just because of the body count or amount of blood. The Sopranos and Dexter are very violent TV series, too, but not even Dexter, which has a serial killer as its “good guy,” presents its murders as perversely as The Following, or puts children and young women in jeopardy as often.
It’s all a matter of tone. Even the idea of watching a classics-obsessed killer target victims with help from a gleeful band of deadly acolytes has been done before, and brilliantly – in the 1973 horror comedy Theatre of Blood, which starred Vincent Price as a Shakespearean actor who returns from his wrongly presumed death to wreak vengeance on the critics who slammed him in life. And using Shakespeare’s bloodiest plays as inspiration to stage the killings.
The plot of that 40-year-old movie, actually, is amazingly close to the plot of The Following – but Theatre of Blood, like Scream, was played for laughs. The Following isn’t. So in one forthcoming episode, when a critic who panned Carroll’s book is selected as a potential victim, there’s nothing funny about it. Like most of the violence in the first episodes of The Following, it’s presented with glee, almost as a primer.
Most horror movies and TV shows make you squirm because you identify with the victim. The Following, while a better new TV show than anything presented last fall, makes me squirm, most of the time, because it seems to be asking me to identify with the killers.
(For my review of The Following on NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross, listen to Monday’s show, or visit the Fresh Air website after 5 p.m. ET on January 21.)