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February 20, 2013

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Dawn Westerberg

Interesting article, thanks for the good read.

The Following had the potential to be a chess game and they settled for checkers.

I wanted to care about the characters in The Following, but I don't. They lack the texture of a McNulty or Moltisanti. The writing managed to make the pilot nothing more than spoiler for the subsequent episodes.

The violence is gratuitous and a pale substitute for an interesting plot with interesting characters. And while it is probably unfair to compare The Following to The Wire or The Sopranos - even if you compare it to, say, Banshee (where there is unbelievable drama and intrigue for such a little town a la Cabot Cove), Banshee at least provides a little more in the way of interesting characters and plot development in between the gratuitous violence.

My TV viewing, for the last 10 years or so, has pretty much been void of CBS, NBC, ABC or Fox. (One exception was Lost which I watched after the fact through Amazon Prime.) The only shows that I made an effort to watch regularly were 30 Rock and Parks and Recreation - which are sit coms. In the area of dramas, I'm much more likely to turn to cable. So when I saw the promotions for The Following, I thought maybe (given the casting of Bacon and Purefoy) this would be a series that caught up with HBO, Showtime, AMC, etc. - only to have it fall short again.

Robert David Sullivan

For economic reasons (i.e., how much they can charge for ad rates), Fox has to come up with dramas that come close to "American Idol"-size audiences. And that means dramas for people with short attention spans, no matter how good the cast is.

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