1 out of 5

Creator: Kevin Williamson

Calling it a train wreck is… close.  But the train needs to be driven by a severe schizophrenic, and maybe the track ends up being made out of licorice or something.  And all the train’s gears and wheels have no concept of non-right angles.

So ex-FBI and sometimes alcoholic Kevin Bacon is called back as a consultant when a wackadoo serial killer he helped catch and made a career out of said catching via a book deal escapes from jaily jail and kills some people.  Serial killer guy (James Purefoy) has an accent that seems fake but is totally real, and is obsessed with Edgar Allan Poe, which is totally OUT THERE whooo so literary ’cause no one studies Poe like this man, quoting the most commonly recognized stories and prose as part of his obsession with death… in some very lightly explored way that it’s the key to appreciating life, la dee da.  And Purefoy is so charming that he’s drummed up this legion of followers, a cult he built up while in jail, and they’re helping him to “write” a new book by actually killing people and being all culty.

What works is when the show actually makes the cult seem like a threat – insane people in love with killing, popping up at random in scary Poe masks and just slaughtering senselessly.  Senseless slaughter is frightening.  What doesn’t work: almost everything else.  Character development is pretty much nil, with random blurbs – haunted past, my daddy raped me – tossed in as total soundbytes to tell us all we need to know about so and so’s lack of appreciation for authority, or why they’re susceptible to cult preaching, or whatever side you want to throw them on.  Everyone’s interchangeable, and no one’s motivations really make sense.  But the show just keeps barreling forward, kicking as much dirt into its path as it digs out whilst attempting to tunnel through to some kernel of a plot.  The problem is that there are continual glimmers of potential.   It makes it hard to completely dismiss when some appreciably odd quirk gets tossed into the fray – switched alliances, a main character dying, Purefoy’s cult grasp slipping – but then the repeated nonsense of the FBI / Marshalls on a full-scale manhunt where they only send ONE AGENT AND A CONSULTANT to face the threats is forehead slapping from the get-go, and the amount of times Kevin Bacon fucks things up by stumbling across important information that he deems only for him, so let’s be smart and try to tackle the situation solo, because it worked in NEVER IT NEVER FUCKING WORKED KEVIN WILLIAMSON  …

And so I mentioned the dude’s name and let’s just get to it: Williamson.  You did Scream, which opened up your world of teen horror.  But I’m sorry – Craven did Scream.  Like Rodriguez did The Faculty.  Both featured scripts that had massive potential to trip over themselves but the films’ structures suggest that those directors were involved in some way beyond just pointing a camera and filming the words.  Otherwise, it’s been a lot of fluff.  And The Following is really no different – all of the fucking pointless plot flip-flopping and loosey goosey “smart” writing that suggests no research was done into police procedures or, I dunno, the fucking internet (you clicked a hidden part of a website!  e-mail me to be part of the cult!  thanks bye!  FBI = STUMPED.  BOUNCED BETWEEN DUMMY SERVERS, SHIIITT THOSE DAMN DUMMY SERVERS) – except that this is Kev’s first work (to me) where he appears to be trying for an older audience, I guess, and not the teen market.  So instead of high school relationship triangles and a jock character, we up it to a TV-MA rating with more sex and “terror” and “risque” stuff like bi threesomes.  Whoop de doo.

Did I watch it?  Yes.  And I hated myself most of the time, knowing it wouldn’t amount to anything, but the silly concept COULD be twisted into an interesting concept, and you have some acting talent… I mean, Bacon is good at the worn down character… if it’s written with some consistency….  But it didn’t amount to anything.  Ever.  Some good moments were never more than that, and never made me truly eager for next week’s episode.  Will I tune in for season 2?  Initially, just to see if our season ender was an out for Bacon or not, but I’m… I’m pretty confident I won’t be returning after that.  I mean, I gave it a season, right?  What did I really expect?

This hatred brought to you by,

senseless swearing incited by senseless writing