When Does The Following Season 4 Come Out? Is It Renewed?

What is The Following about?

Kevin Bacon holds this show together through sheer force of presence. He plays Ryan Hardy, a damaged, drinking ex-FBI agent pulled back into the orbit of a charismatic serial killer he once caught, and the show leans hard on that central relationship. James Purefoy's Joe Carroll is a Poe-obsessed professor who runs a cult of killers from prison, which sounds ludicrous, and the show knows it, leaning into the pulpy excess rather than apologizing for it.

The tone is relentlessly dark and frequently violent, edging into the kind of grotesque that earned FOX considerable criticism from press watchdogs in its early run. Creator Kevin Williamson, who made his name with Scream, is comfortable in this register, and The Following has the same interest in killers who are self-aware, theatrical, and literary in their self-conception. Carroll quotes Poe, monologues about beauty and death, and draws followers who seem to find meaning in their own cruelty. It is manipulative television, and it works best when you are not stopping to ask questions.

Critics were mixed from the start. The pilot drew strong numbers and genuine enthusiasm for Bacon and Purefoy, but reviewers grew increasingly frustrated as the show multiplied its cult members and strained credulity across the first season. By season two it had introduced new villains and shifted away from Carroll, which disappointed some viewers and failed to fully replace what made the dynamic interesting. Ratings declined across the three-season run.

What the show really is, stripped down, is a cat-and-mouse thriller that understands the appeal of a villain who speaks in complete sentences. Purefoy is having tremendous fun, and some of that transfers to the audience even when the plotting falls apart.

Created by Kevin Williamson

Is The Following renewed or cancelled?

Why was The Following cancelled?

The Following arrived on FOX in January 2013 with considerable momentum, pulling in massive premiere numbers built on the pairing of Kevin Bacon and James Purefoy. The premise, a charismatic serial killer orchestrating a cult of murderers from behind bars, felt fresh enough in that first season to sustain genuine tension. But the show had a structural problem baked in from the start: it kept escalating. Each season had to top the last in body count and conspiracy, and by season three the whole enterprise felt exhausted, almost self-parodying in its relentlessness.

The ratings told the real story. That strong debut audience eroded steadily across three seasons, with the third season in particular shedding viewers at a rate FOX could not ignore. By 2015, the show was drawing a fraction of what it once had, and the demographic numbers that advertisers actually care about had slipped significantly. FOX had already been cancelling lower-performing dramas with some regularity during this period, and The Following no longer looked like an asset worth protecting.

There was also a broader cultural conversation happening around this time about torture porn aesthetics and graphic violence on network television, and The Following attracted criticism for wallowing in brutality without enough dramatic payoff to justify it. Whether that criticism directly influenced the network's decision is hard to say, but it probably did not help the show's case when renewal discussions came around. FOX pulled the plug after three seasons, and given how depleted the central premise had become by that point, it is difficult to argue the show had much road left anyway.

The Following Season 4 Release Date

Best & worst episodes

The Following seasons

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The Following latest news

• ‘The Following’ Kevin Bacon Series Returning to Netflix After Eight Year Hiatus

  NewsAPI:What's on Netflix · 2025-12-05renewal positive