Trash TV: The Following
I’m not sure exactly when this happened, but at some point we all, as a culture, decided that serial killers are not only superhuman murder-geniuses, but also that they’re extremely sexy. I’m honestly not sure what this says about us.
Anyway here’s a review of the first season of The Following, a Kevin Bacon-starring TV series about a serial killer cult.
Kevin Baconator plays Ryan Hardy, an alcoholic detective whose life spiralled out of control after he caught (and was almost killed by) Joe Carroll, an English professor who murdered fourteen young women at the university where he worked. A month before he’s due to be executed Carroll escapes, and while it appears at first that he’s just hunting down the one victim he failed to kill due to Hardy’s intervention, it turns out he’s got a much more ambitious plan: unleash the fanatical cult of young murderers that he’s been cultivating since before his original killing spree.
“Serial killer cult” is one of those premises that seems ripe for the taking: there’s a strong overlap between serial killers and cults in the public mind due to the Manson family murders, and many other cult leaders also become something akin to a serial killer by proxy via driving their followers to murder and/or suicide. I’m certain there have been attempts at it before The Following; I was even kicking around an idea myself along similar lines shortly before the series was announced, and since I’m such an amazing writer, the concept must be good.
The Following, however, is not.
The series' biggest issue for me is tone. Serial murders are inherently a grim concept, and The Following features levels of gore and violence--usually directed at young women--that are a notch above what you generally see on mainstream TV. For example, Joe Carroll’s preferred murder method involves cutting his victim’s eyes out, preferably while they’re still alive; you don’t actually see him doing it on camera, but the bloody aftermath and the way it’s discussed don’t shy away from what a gruesome, painful death this would be. At times, the series seems to be fully crossing the genre line from crime fiction into outright horror.
Except that ends up being a huge problem, because Joe Carroll is a total cartoon character, to an extent that makes Hannibal Lecter look like the height of realism. I’ve accepted the fact that these types of stories are heavily predicated on the idea that serial killers are cunning predators whose minds operate on a higher plane than normal people’s (as opposed to reality, where most of them are schlubby, dysfunctional sad-sacks who get away with their crimes largely due to luck and police incompetence), but there has to be a line somewhere.
Joe Carroll straight-up has super powers. In the very first scene of the first episode, he escapes from a maximum security prison by killing three armed guards. The guy is an English professor, remember. Apparently all of the members of his cult have inherited his magic powers, because they’re all similarly possessed of super-strength, incredible fighting prowess and the ability to get into and out of heavily-fortified locations without detection.
This all ties into a weird unspoken assumption of a lot of serial killer fiction, which is that being a serial killer inherently makes you really good at not just killing people, but all of the ancillary skills that go along with killing people, like lock-picking, stealth, persuasion, hand to hand combat and even computer hacking. Thus, once a serial killer’s body-count reaches double-digits they’re able to take down fully-armed soldiers using nothing but a straightened paper-clip. It’s like they’re in a video game and killing people gives them skill points, which they can then invest in whatever skill-set they want.
(Amusingly, the next Halloween movie appears to be consciously invoking this idea, based on the dialogue in the trailer).
I could maybe accept this if Joe Carroll and his serial killer proteges were actually in the least bit scary or intimidating, but they’re absolutely not. Carroll in particular is clearly meant to be an Anthony Hopkins-era Hannibal Lecter figure, all diabolical intelligence and alluring sophistication hiding his sadism, but the actor playing him can’t pull it off at all.
He mostly just makes this face
We’re told that he’s this master manipulator who was able to attract all of these impressionable young people to him and make them fanatically devoted to him, but in reality he just comes off as a massive creep. It’s extremely unclear to me what any of his devotees are supposed to have seen in him, especially to the extent that they’d willingly die for him.
The other killers are possibly even worse. A big chunk of the first half of the first season is focused on three of them living together in a safehouse, and they’re all generically attractive CW actors getting into petty relationship squabbles, while also being remorseless serial killers who torture and murder people. There’s this incredibly stupid love triangle going on while one of them has a woman tied up in the basement, so we go from “Oh no I’m torn between two potential lovers and struggling with my sexual identity!” to “Here’s this terrified young woman weeping and begging for her life while the hunky serial killer works up the nerve to cut her throat.”
It’s a bit strange.
On top of all of that, Joe Carroll’s serial killer religion is all Edgar Allan Poe themed, so he and his followers are writing “Nevermore” on walls in their victims’ blood. This manages to be both extremely cliched and extremely silly, which is a fatal combination for anything you’re meant to take the least bit seriously.
The Following somehow managed to run for three seasons. Maybe the next two are less ridiculous than the first one, but I won’t be putting in the effort to find out.