Fox is building up its reputation in the thriller genre with The Following, which follows (forgive me) in the footsteps of programming like 24. Starring Kevin Bacon as Ryan Hardy, an ex-FBI agent roped into the investigation of a killer he thought he put behind bars for good, The Following throws viewers headlong into an ultraviolent and tense program that walks a fine line between success and coming apart at the seams.
The premise is relatively simple: serial killer Joe Carroll (James Purefoy), former literature professor obsessed with the work of Poe and other Romantics, was finally brought to heel by none other than Ryan Hardy at the peak of his career. In a cunningly executed escape, Carroll bursts free from prison just long enough to finish his magnum opus of killing before returning again…but the killings keep coming, and investigators realise they have a cult on their hands.
The Following revolves around the cultivation of a serial killer’s following on steroids, coordinated through social networking, stealth visits to prison under false names, and more. It’s a kind of exploration of what could happen to the ever-present groups that idolise serial killers in a world where contact is easier than it ever was before. When people can meet and coordinate on and off line, their world simultaneously expands and contracts, making it easier to find new cult members, but also easier to isolate yourself with like-minded people, amplifying the cult effect.
With a short initial season of only 15 episodes, The Following has the option of keeping the storyline tight, crisp, and fascinating, without veering off into filler territory, a common problem with US television. Whether it can keep that up remains to be seen if the show gets picked up for additional seasons; in the US, the convoluted plot to justify the continued existence of a programme that’s performing well has become a way of life, even if it means tearing the story, and the characters, apart.
As a straight-up thriller, The Following has a lot going for it. It’s a show that makes viewers jump at the right moments, maintains arcs of character development over multiple episodes, and contains an overall plot to drive the story forward rather than allowing it to bog down. But there’s more just below the surface that requires a closer look and more thoughtful examination, because The Following is not just a thriller, and some of the things it says about both media and society are troubling. Perhaps not a surprise from a network like Fox, but worth noting, especially if The Following makes it big, which it has the potential to do.
In the case of The Following, one thing makes it stand out from other network television: the violence. This is an unusually graphically violent show that doesn’t flinch from women stabbing themselves in the face with ice picks and other gruesome scenes, all of which, naturally, depict violence against women. Both women and men are involved as perpetrators, but that doesn’t erase the fact that the bulk of the victims in The Following are young women, and the violence isn’t performed as a metacommentary on violence in society.
‘If it bleeds, it leads,’ and if ‘it’ is a comely young woman, it turns heads. Fox is clearly cannily aware of that with The Following and it uses violence against women, often highly sexualised and sometimes racialised as well, for both shock value and titillation. With a new murder each week for viewers to salivate over, the show makes sure people are never disappointed. Viewers may eventually tire of the onslaught of violence, but perhaps not; programmes like True Blood and Spartacus traffic on repeated violence, grim reminders that audiences seem to relish opportunities to see the depth of cruelty human beings can inflict on one another.
Distinctively, The Following includes a cult that appears to be largely spearheaded by a woman, Emma Hill (Valorie Curry). Emma’s often the instigator and the planner, three steps ahead of the rest of the group, and she’s vicious and bloodthirsty. Troublingly, Emma is depicted as gender nonconforming, with short hair and a masculine mode of dress, and like the other cult members, there’s also a clear message that she doesn’t fit into heteronormative sexuality either; a shower scene at the end of a recent episode with two of her male co-conspirators was highly suggestive.
The message The Following seems to be sending is that people who lie outside the norm are more susceptible to being entranced by serial killers, drawn into cult-like environments, and manifesting the capacity for brutality and violence. This reiterates the message that people ‘like us’ (presuming that viewers conform to a specific norm) don’t commit crimes ‘like that,’ while shying away from the fact that Carroll himself is a very model of white masculine heteronormativity. Though he may have an obsession with romantic poetry, before his fall he had a wife, a child, a career. He was in fact ‘just like us’ and he was the greatest monster of all, which raises some uncomfortable questions that I hope The Following chooses to probe more deeply. It’s worth noting, after all, that most serial killers are white, heterosexual men.
Emma and the other cult members don’t become killers because of their gender or sexuality, but because they are outcast and marginalised, searching for something to fill their lives. Rather than relying on the shorthand that ‘deviance’ makes people into killers, The Following could and should be focusing on how marginalisation turns people into outcasts who can become highly vulnerable; a subject briefly touched upon with Emma’s mother, depicted as someone who repeatedly harassed her daughter for the way she looked. If the show can give us more of that, less violence against women, and fewer reminders that anything other than rigid conforming with sex and gender norms is cause for suspicious, it would be a great deal more fun to watch.