The new Fox TV series The Following, which premieres January 21 at 9 p.m. Eastern time, offers an unusual—and zeitgeist-infused–twist on the usual police procedural in which an investigator pursues a serial killer.
After Joe Carroll (portrayed by James Purefoy)—a former college literature instructor who murdered 14 female students-escapes from death row, the FBI enlists retired agent Ryan Hardy (Kevin Bacon), who apprehended him a decade before, to track him down before he continues his spree. The big difference is that this time, the menace confronting Hardy has gone viral. The glib, charismatic Carroll, whose grisly crimes were inspired by the works of Edgar Allen Poe, became an object of public and media fascination in the fashion of the infamous Ted Bundy. Carroll managed to leverage his high profile to connect with perhaps hundreds of other similarly deranged individuals across the nation. He then covertly organized the killers into a far-flung network that magnifies his ability to inflict carnage.
The idea of a network of murderous maniacs working in concert is not only novel, but trendy. In part because it evokes the Internet-age concept of crowdsourcing, in which a problem is solved or a business goal is accomplished by distributing incremental tasks to a large group of people who work in parallel. It also in some ways parallels another phenomenon, the flash mob, in which a group of individuals are recruited—usually via the Internet or mobile messaging—to suddenly show up in one place and commit an act. Like other efforts to play off Internet-Age trends in TV crime dramas—like the murder-on-webcam depicted a few seasons ago on the hit series NCIS—the premise of The Following prompts the inevitable chilling question: Could it really happen?
I love psychological thrillers. 
X 100. Wow.
