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

What is The Following about?

Kevin Bacon plays Ryan Hardy, a damaged ex-FBI agent with a pacemaker and a drinking problem, and he is genuinely good here, bringing a physical weariness to a show that otherwise has trouble believing in anything except its next shock. The premise is clever enough: a charismatic serial killer who taught literature has spent his prison years building a cult of followers through correspondence, and his escape kicks off a cat-and-mouse story where the mouse has an army. James Purefoy plays Joe Carroll as a preening, Edgar Allan Poe-obsessed narcissist, and he's enjoyable company in the way that only TV villains who are allowed to monologue freely tend to be.

The tone is relentlessly dark and the violence is frequent and graphic, which earned the show some criticism even from viewers who stuck with it. Kevin Williamson, who made his name with Scream, is comfortable in this register, but The Following sometimes mistakes brutality for tension. The first season works because the cult mechanics are genuinely unsettling, the idea that anyone around Hardy could be a sleeper. By season two the show had largely spent that idea and was cycling through new villains with diminishing returns.

Critics were mixed from the start. The pilot drew large numbers for Fox and the reviews acknowledged Bacon as a reason to watch, but many noted the show's reliance on torture, murder, and female victims in ways that felt less like darkness with purpose and more like habit. Audience scores tracked higher than critical ones, which tells you something about what the show is actually selling.

It sits in the same neighborhood as procedural thrillers like Hannibal and The Blacklist, though it lacks the former's visual ambition and the latter's sense of fun. What it has, especially early on, is Bacon holding the whole unstable structure together through sheer presence. The scene of him realizing, again, that Carroll has been ten steps ahead is one the show repeats too many times, but Bacon makes it land almost every time.

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

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