The Following EP Weighs In on Joe's Future, That Killer Cliffhanger and a 'Very Different' Season 2

If The Following‘s Season 1 finale left you slack-jawed with more than a few burning questions, don’t fret! TVLine was right there with you, and we tracked down the Fox drama’s executive producer Marcos Siega for some answers.
Here, one of the brains behind the series discusses whether or not Joe Carroll truly met his demise, how some dearly departed faces might pop up again next year, what a “very different” Season 2 has in store and much more.
TVLINE | Can you definitively say that Joe is dead?
I’ve been getting text messages all morning from friends and family, and some people are saying, ‘I loved it! Best episode yet. I can’t believe you killed Joe!’ And others are like, ‘You expect me to think you killed Joe?’ [Laughs] Some people believe he’s gone and some people think that we’ll figure out [a way to bring him back], but all I can say is that [creator/showrunner] Kevin Williamson knew where he wanted this thing to go. We shot a couple of different versions to protect ourselves in terms of how we were going to present it to the audience, and then after we showed it to Warner Bros. and Fox and talked about it, we put together the version that made the most sense. But how it plays out is part of the fun of doing a cliffhanger.

TVLINE | Was it always the plan to “kill” him by the end of the season?
Wow, you’re trying to trap me… [Laughs]
TVLINE | No, I just know that things can change or develop organically as you move through the season. The same thing goes for the various characters you killed off along the way.
[Laughs] With the actors who “didn’t know,” I sat down with every single actor early on — and I mean top to bottom — and told them that we know where the season is going and that I wasn’t going to tell them if or when they’re going to die, but they needed to know that in this story no one is safe. Everyone understands that a show like this has those kinds of stakes. But I do struggle with some of the things we’ve laid out. I knew from the day we cast Annie [Parisse] as Parker that she was going to meet some big demise, and that’s what changes; it evolves in terms of how and when it’s going to happen. But then I fell in love with Annie as a person and with Parker as a character and I wondered why we had to [kill her]. But you realize that it all serves the greater purpose. Parker’s death services Ryan’s Hardy’s character, and it’s part of the building blocks of who he is and who he’s going to become in Season 2… So, the short answer is yes, we knew and know where we’re going, but I can’t really tell you specifics because that’s the fun of it.
TVLINE | So, back to Joe’s “death” specifically…
All I’ll say is the way that it ended is always the way that I knew it would end.
TVLINE | Do you think this is a show that could move forward without Joe? Could this ever be a series with various Big Bads or new branches of the cult?
I give you mad props, Meg, for the creative way you’re asking me to tell you if Joe is dead or alive. [Laughs] I have full confidence in Kevin Williamson’s ability, if he chose, to write a character that is as compelling as Joe Carroll… We got people to root for Joe, right? We got you to fall in love with Joe Carroll the serial killer. So, I do think we could do it again if we needed to… But I don’t think it’s that black-and-white for us. There’s a big picture here. Kevin’s been very vocal about this being a passion project for him; he’s gone through a lot of stages and evolution about how he’s going to tell the story… But I do know that when he first sat down, he knew how three seasons could play out — and he could build beyond that. He had a solid foundation when he started.

TVLINE | You mentioned at a recent event that you shot some extra footage that you’ll be able to use in Season 2. Is that just flashback-type stuff? Or will is actually service the story?
There are some things we shot as alternates… Because it was the finale and we wouldn’t have the opportunity to go back and reshoot, we protected ourselves. And there are some things we shot that we know are absolutely essential to next season in A) answering questions, B) satisfying the audience and C) propelling the story. We have a little bit of everything in what we shot, and it was all very deliberate.
TVLINE | Given the way the finale ended, do you guys already have a place in mind for where Season 2 will pick up?
There’s a plan and framework in place, yes. Once the writers’ room starts up, that’s when things start to evolve and new ideas come out. But we’re not going in with a white board with no ideas on it.
TVLINE | Looking back at Season 1, is there anything you’re particularly proud of? And on the flip side, is there anything you maybe would have done differently?
I haven’t had that conversation with Kevin, so I can’t speak for him. But I personally was surprised at how the Jacob/Paul story evolved early on and it became my favorite storyline. I found myself really invested in these two guys and wanting to see more. I knew where we were going with it and how much of that story we were going to tell, but I kept thinking that maybe we would alter it a little bit since people were responding to it. Those are the sort of things that surprise me. I wouldn’t have predicted that early on… But at the end of the day, because Kevin has such a strong framework, it would have pulled too many strings and unraveled too many things if he’d deviated from that… Also, at the beginning of the season, I would sometimes [bring up] how we could give Ryan Hardy a bit more depth. In Episode 6, when he’s held hostage at the farmhouse, we really got to see a sassier side of him when he was bantering with the captors, and I really loved that. I kept pushing for more of that Hardy, too — and I think we will see more of that.
TVLINE | Tight-lipped as you are, I know you have a good Season 2 tease somewhere in you.
We put it all out there in terms of what we’d want the audience to be guessing: Who really died? How do you resolve it? How do you move forward if people die? What I can say about Season 2 is that it’s a very different season, but at the same time it will feel like a continuation of the story. There’s no way to tell the same story again; we can’t have the exact same moments of jeopardy, because then people will get bored and it’s predictable. The brilliance behind the series that Kevin has built is that he’s seen how these steps need to evolve. The thing that’s going to surprise people most, I hope, is that the fans will become as invested in that story as they were in this one — and even more so because now they know these characters and we’ll have to spend less time explaining backstory.

Source:http://tvline.com

The Following finale review: The Final Chapter

1.15 The Final Chapter
  
I didn't watch The Killing, but apparently fans of the programme have said that the ending was less than satisfying. Too many loose ends, too much held over for the next season, too little resolution. The Following will not be having that problem, thanks to a satisfying, tense, and really well done final episode for the first season. Fittingly called The Final Chapter, the book is pretty effectively closed on the Joe Carroll saga while still having a cliffhanger leading into the second season.
For a show that has been pretty brainless throughout its run, it opened very strongly and it ended very strongly, suggesting that the initial 'movie' from writer/creator Kevin Williamson suffered from the process to extend it to a full season of television. Indeed, the opening was very good and the show kind of struggled to build from there until the past few episodes when the rising action toward the climax began to build. When things in Joe Carroll's world started falling apart, The Following pulled together. It never quite became as good as I had hoped, or as good as the actors had hoped, but it certainly became something watchable.
That's particularly true this week. Given that this is the end of the season, there's no reason for The Following to hold anything back (even though it's been approved for a second run). To that extent, the show really seemed to increase the pressure, add to the tension (particularly towards the end of the episode), and pile up the bodies like cordwood. There's a certain brutality that comes out of the show in times of stress, and despite being on network television, it seems to revel in brutality. I believe I've figured out how The Following is able to do so many terrible things (especially this week) while not getting crushed by the censors. It shows stabbings and shootings and the like, but the real violence isn't in the collapsible knife blade or the exploding squibs, it's in the foley room. The sound effects, as best displayed by Joe stabbing some random boat captain to death in a lighthouse this week, are absolutely stomach-churning when seen alongside the actual killing. The squishy sound design is just brilliant.
If The Following ended with the closing title card on this season, it'd be... pretty satisfying, if weird. However, there's going to be a second season, and while I have a pretty good idea of what that might be (they kind of hint at it with the end of this episode), I have to say that closing the book on frustrated author and Poe fanatic Joe Carroll might be the best thing for the show in the long run. It gets it closer to the dream version of The Following, which is Ryan Hardy and Mike Weston as a two-man anti-crime squad facing off against a host of anonymous, easy-to-kill-and-torture serial killers led by a shifting cadre of masterminds. Alternately, if that gets boring after what I can only assume will be a successful second season, ratings-wise, you have one agent turn on the other one and jump ship to the bad guys (not such a far off proposition when you consider how much of a loose cannon Ryan Hardy has been all season, what with the randomly breaking fingers and beating information out of suspects like Jack Bauer on a coke bender).
Really, if the show just wants to use its biggest strength and make it solely about Ryan Hardy and his curse, I'm all about that. Shawn Ashmore has been a fine partner for Bacon to play off, and the two work as a pretty good buddy cop pairing of wily veteran and the younger, inexperienced agent willing to learn at his feet. Call them Batman and Robin, except Batman is openly a vigilante and Robin is also crazy and dangerous rather than a pre-teen in tights.
The Following was sold with Joe Carroll being described as brilliant, charismatic, and psychotic, but that sounds a whole lot more like the show's protagonist than its antagonist.

Source:  http://www.denofgeek.com

The Following episode 14 review: The End Is Near

1.14 The End Is Near

The Following seems to have blown all its lighting budget on collapsible knives and corn syrup blood instead of investing in ways to shoot outdoor scenes at night without losing the entire scene to murky nothingness. A chase through the woods is all noise and occasional flashes of shadows moving across less shadowy places, and it's not the effective sort of noise that we got at the end of the episode over the ending title card. In some scenes, such as this week's big, confusing cultists versus townspeople orgy of violence, it makes sense for the show to go dark in the literal sense; there are only so many stabbings and guttings and shootings you can show to America, even on the Fox Network.
I understand that taking light away can create tension where there is none, even if nothing happens except Kevin Bacon tripping over an ottoman, but when you've got stuff that's already fairly tense—searching room to room for a hive of killers, for example—you don't need to resort to cheap tension so much. It's a technique that can work, but if it's overused (like it is on this show), it becomes tedious. Joshua Butler, this week's director, ends up going back to the darkness multiple times. Sometimes, it works great; other times, it's just kind of annoying that we can't see what's going on.
However, when we can see what's going on, I kind of like how the show is playing out the Joe Carroll string. James Purefoy hasn't had a lot to do with his character, but this week seems to be Joe's best episode since the opener, if only because he's been doing a lot of character work all season long that seems to be finally paying off. The more Joe's plan unravels, the more dangerous Joe becomes, but not necessarily to Ryan. Mostly, Joe's becoming dangerous to himself, thanks to his increased drinking, his gobbling of pain pills, and the massive open wound on his side that gives all his button-down shirts a telltale stigmata.
Joe still isn't much of a compelling cult leader, even when he's rallying his troops for a big cult event via goofy prayer/chanting. However, as a completely unhinged failure, he's a lot more entertaining. Watching Joe try to keep his cool as he keeps screwing up scheme after scheme is actually pretty fun, and it gives Purefoy something to sink his teeth into as Joe becomes less confident and cool and more desperate and twitchy. I wouldn't say that the show is finding the character, but I would say that the character is sinking to the level of the writing in a sense. The Following uses a ton of cliches, and as Joe's facade is intentionally cracked, his cheesiness makes more sense as he's just frantically trying to cling to the shreds of his broken empire.
That's what is so curious about The Following getting picked up for a second season. With the way the Followers seem to be dying off and with the way the FBI seems to be finally closing in on Joe, I'm not sure how they're going to get a second season out of the programme. If they hadn't blown through all their ideas about Joe escaping and having his cult and all that stuff this season, then they could have saved some of it for next year. As it is, they must have some kind of idea for next season, perhaps based around the few of Joe's followers that haven't died, or... who knows, really. Maybe Ryan joins the FBI again as part of an anti-cult task force?
There are two episodes left, and it doesn't seem like Joe's going to make a getaway if things continue to go the way they area. In fact, I'm not sure he should make a getaway; he had all the technology and manpower he could want at his disposal, and he wastes it kidnapping his ex-wife and picking on Kevin Bacon and writing a terrible book. There may be a lot of bad blood between Hardy and Carroll, but I wouldn't go so far as to say the two are an even match. Thankfully for Joe, the average FBI agent is as incompetent as he is, so that makes the clashes between cult and cop more even.
Maybe next season one of Joe's more intelligent acolytes—perhaps the mysterious Alex or whatever his name is that the show introduced this week out of nowhere as the Roderick replacement—might be a fitting replacement for the mad associate professor of Stab University.

Source: http://www.denofgeek.com

The Following episode 13 review: Havenport

 
1.13 Havenport
The director of tonight's visit to the fine men and women of the FBI is Nicole Kassell. You may recognize that name (but probably not) from the Kevin Bacon film The Woodsman. I can't help but think Bacon got her this gig. If so, then it worked out for both of them, because this was one of the better episodes of The Following in recent memory. Not that it was without its crazy leaps of logic (thanks to writers Vincent Angell and David Wilcox), but it was at least well-shot craziness. This is the show's most successful use of chiaroscuro shading; it's dark in a key action sequence, but not so dark you can't tell what happens. That's a big improvement for the show, which loves shoot-outs in the dark but hates actually lighting them.
One of the things that The Following has been doing well towards the end of this season is teasing at dissension among the ranks. Joe and Roderick, after all, have been butting heads for a while now, and before them Emma, Paul, and Jacob took the lead on the inter-terrorist squabbling during their time as babysitter for Joey. Even though the threesome has broken up, there's still some residual conflict there. Jacob has been trying for a while to become the killer Joe wants him to be, but he hasn't made that leap into brutality that Roderick and others have been able to; meanwhile, Emma can't quite shake off Jacob (or get Joe to shake off his wife). Much like a real college relationship, it's messy and may be over, but hasn't officially ended given what we see this week. I like that all the relationships on the programme are messy; even if it's not executed well (and usually it is not), at least the show is trying to make things complex and interesting (and they succeeded this week with the Joe/Roderick conflict, the Claire/Joe conflict, and Ryan in general).
This week's episode is definitely the chance for Roderick (Warren Kole, who has done some good work with his role) to shine as the character of the week. He's the agent of action, even though his actions are expected. (Ditto the strange girl that shows up near the end of the episode to talk to Ryan; I knew something bad would come from that, but I was glad to see it happen.) I like that things happen; if they're predictable, that just means that, perhaps, the show laid the groundwork for the events by putting conflicts into motion and hinting at problems in the ranks well before actually acting upon the tension.
It begs the question: if a twist is predictable, is it still a twist? If you expect a twist, but you get something that's a little less traditional than the twist you expect, does that make it a victory? I suppose to me any surprise is a good one. Even if I expect something will happen, and something does happen that's slightly different than the direction I figured the show was going, it's a boon. Any trick, any clever idea, any little change in routine is a step forward for The Following, which will probably not be able to wring a second season out of the Cult storyline unless something major happens to prevent Joe Carroll's book from having a downer ending.

Source:http://www.denofgeek.com

The Following episode 12 review: The Curse

 
1.12 The Curse
After a pretty lacklustre series of episodes, The Following has more or less reached a level of appealing weirdness for me. For example, this week's episode (written by Seamus Kevin Fahey and Amanda Kate Schuman) takes great delight in taking all of the characters we know and completely flipping their established roles. By and large, if someone has been behaving a certain way throughout the entire season, this episode they decided to completely change their motivation for various reasons.
For some, like Weston in the wake of his near-death experience, it makes sense. He's been through some bad stuff lately, and that might explain why his relationship with Ryan goes from Suckup and Hero to Surly Teenager and Concerned Father Figure in a span of a week. The relationship also morphs from Good Cop and Bad Cop to Psychotic Cop and Stunned But Morally Ambiguous Cop. It's clever in a sense that it makes Ryan distinctly uncomfortable with how he's influencing his fellow agent, and it's also an effective driver of the plot by making Weston aggressive and mistake-prone. It's a nice counterpoint to Ryan; yes, he's aggressive and takes risks, but he's a thinker (as we see in the episode's final reveal) and his risk comes with plenty of thought put into it. He's a clever character, albeit an unlucky one.
Being clever and unlucky makes him the opposite of Joe Carroll, whose frustration with... well, everything seems to be boiling over into his writing. Yes, Joe finally works on this mythical book sequel of his, and the results are not very good. The little snippets we get to read aren't terribly impressive, Joe isn't happy with it judging by the workout his backspace button gets, and even Claire is unimpressed with his tome (and lets him know with a pretty brutal, effective cut-down during one of her arguments with her ex-husband/current kidnapper).
Rather than being foolish, Claire has decided - at least for this week - to be aggressive. She makes an escape attempt, she verbally undercuts an already-frustrated Joe, and she engages in a pretty violent brawl with Emma, even getting the better of the experienced serial killer thanks to her enraged mum strength and Emma's sudden desire to make nice (I believe it's Joe's idea, which is why it's a bad one). Speaking of Emma, now thanks to his experience with her, Jacob has become a more aggressive wannabe killer, volunteering for the mission of the week and everything. It seems out of character, and it is.
Truthfully, most of the behaviour this week seems out of character, either driven by frustration, circumstances, or some attempt at manufacturing a personality. (Except for Ryan being awesome as always, because Kevin Bacon can make pretty much any scene work in his favour simply by being so much better than the material.) It seems that the only person who gets something truthful revealed about himself is Ryan Hardy, telling the story of his father's captor, and possibly Roderick, who reveals that he loves Joe's cult because he can be himself rather than hide behind a mask of sanity. Even Roderick seems to have his limits.
As Roderick tells Claire, the cult is made up of a collection of people with different wants, needs, and sinister urges. For every casual killer there's one or two hardcore psychopaths balanced out by a dozen Emma-style groupies, wannabes, and hangers-on. Will Carrollism's military wing win out, or are they even a part of Joe's master plan? What is Joe's endgame? Despite myself, despite knowing better, I find myself getting drawn into the show again, for all the wrong reasons. It's compelling in a disaster sense.

Source: http://www.denofgeek.com

The Following episode 11 review: Whips And Regret

Its actors are trying their best, but can they save a flailing show? Ron checks out the latest episode of The Following...

This review contains spoilers.
1.11 Whips and Regret
One of the problems with the henchmen-of-the-week format is that even henchmen who appear in multiple episodes, like Vince this week (one of the two survivalists who led the raid to get Claire back), have a lot of trouble connecting to the audience if they don't get Jacob/Emma, Roderick, or Joe levels of screen time. We learn about Vince and his friend/hook-up buddy Hailey and when Hailey is put in peril... nobody really cares. I don't care. Agent Parker and Ryan care but only because they'll get in trouble for her injury. Roderick smashes a random fellow on the face and we don't care because he has no back-story. Roderick and Vince have a Mexican stand-off and guess what? No one really cares (and nothing really happens to boot).
There are probably three storylines where I feel engaged with the characters in The Following. One of them is, of course, Ryan and Joe. And, I suppose, the Claire addition to the tripod. The other one is the open power struggle between Joe and Roderick. I don't particularly care who comes out on top, though I think at this point Roderick is the more dangerous and driven of the two. Without Joe, there is not cult. Without Roderick, there is no cult capable of doing anything other than listening to Gothic romance lectures from an nontenured assistant professor of English at the local community college. And, of course, there's Jacob and Emma. The seeds were planted in the previous episode, and they've grown into a bush full of awkward, bitter fruit. I'm not sure why Emma thinks abandoning someone to the cops and then refusing to help them later would endear her to Jacob, but at this point there's not a lot on the show that makes a ton of sense.
I'll put the blame for that on Kevin Williamson (who wrote this week's episode with Rebecca Dameron). As the season continues, The Following continues to flail more and more wildly, like FBI agents chasing a survivalist through a darkened former armory. Remember Ryan's alcoholism? Well, not only is he drinking his breakfast again, it's also being directly called out by Agent Parker. Did it go away for a bit, then resurface? Did it suddenly not be a problem? Even Joe brings it up again, telling Ryan not to be such a cliché because he'll be toning down the alcoholism aspect in his book (another discarded thread and a funny meta-shot at the writers).
The one thing the show has been consistent at is shooting in the darkest possible environments. If there's a dank corridor, an unfinished basement, a sticky-looking hallway at an S&M club, an underpass, an abandoned building, a murky factory... if there's an unpleasant, unlit place, Marcos Siega will find it and shoot a scene there. Multiple places like that are used in this week's episode, and a long, extended action sequence was filmed using flashlights as the only sources of light. It's tense, at times, but it's more confusing than anything else. I had no idea what was going on, who was doing what, who was killing whom, and the confusion only cleared up when Kevin Bacon showed up and gunned down some random cultists.
With every passing week, The Following goes from a show with the potential to be good, to a show that has no potential whatsoever to be quality programming in the traditional sense. Those good threads the show had in the pilot are getting lost in its weaker elements, threatening to subsume them completely. However, the “worse” the show gets, the more interesting it becomes. It's in no danger of becoming good any time soon, but it's edging closer and closer to spectacularly bad. The fact that the actors are all trying so bloody hard to make it work is what makes the show almost work from a fiasco standpoint.

Source:http://www.denofgeek.com

The Following episode 10 review: Guilt

Serial killer series The Following continues to let its women characters down. Here's Ron's review of Guilt...

This review contains spoilers.
1.10 Guilt
The Following has a problem named Natalie Zea. Or rather, the writing staff has a problem writing for women. Despite the quality of the actress and her chemistry with Kevin Bacon, Claire makes the absolutely worst decisions possible pretty much every time she gets a chance to make a decision. This is not a problem unique to The Following, since The Walking Dead has had both Andrea and Lori screwing up left and right for the better part of three seasons (Andrea is particularly bad). If forced to categorize Claire on the Andrea Scale of Stupid, which I am inventing just for this paragraph, she's definitely hovering close to Full Andrea, just with a better actress.
So much of the plot around her has focused on three things: her marriage to Joe, her relationship with Ryan, and being a mother to Joey. Getting married to Joe is forgivable, as she didn't know he was a serial killer and any true crime show reveals that most people don't know they're with a serial killer until the cops kick in the door or he turns the knife on the wife. Ditto the relationship with Ryan, since she was single due to her husband being in jail. She couldn't know he had a death curse where everyone dies when they become his friend. However, the fact that Claire keeps leaving the safety of FBI custody to put herself into the midst of Joe's snake nest of serial killers because she wants to see her son does not make sense. Joe has your son, that much is true; but you're a piece of leverage. With you, the FBI has something that Joe wants. You're a living, breathing bargaining chip. When you give yourself over just to see your son, your odds of removing your son from a horrible environment go down a great deal.
To balance out Claire's naïve, earnest desire to be with her son despite all logic, there's Emma. From stealing Joey in The Following's first episode, she's developed into quite the effective villain, even if she does depend a great deal on the Lori from season two Lady MacBeth manipulation act to keep her various fellows in line, but that kind of song and dance won't work forever, and when the jig is up, it's really up. Emma found that out the hard way this week. After betraying Jacob and Paul, abandoning them as she escaped justice and ignored their pleas for help (until Jacob contacted Roderick, who seems to be the guy who gets things done), she then tries to buddy back up to Jacob and it never really works.
It's a clever attempt by writers Kevin Williamson and Shintaro Shimosawa to set up a comeuppance for one of the show's more evil killers - even in a group of serial killers, Emma seems to be the one most likely to throw the group under the bus when it benefits her and her attempts to bed Joe - but the show seems to pull up short when it comes down to actually having Jacob do something about Emma aside from threatening her. Sure it was nice to see someone threatening Emma for a change, rather than Emma threatening other people, but I kind of wanted to see Jacob draw some blood. That's still probably going to happen, as Emma is too evil and reckless to live, but the battle lines seem to be drawing themselves in the serial killer came. Joe and Emma on one side, Roderick and Jacob on the other.
It just seems hard for The Following to keep justifying these bad, nonsensical decisions by characters. I know that a certain amount of stupid is necessary to make television function, but Claire just takes the moron cake. I imagine that, before long, she'll somehow escape from the Murder Mansion, only to volunteer to go back into the custody of a group of crazed killers to protect her son who is in the least amount of danger of anyone there because he's the scion of the group leader.

Source:http://www.denofgeek.com