STAYING IN
MURDER IN THE FIRST Brian Donaldson talks to Kevin Bacon as he takes on his first television lead role in serial killer thriller The Following
52 THE LIST 13 Dec 2012–24 Jan 2013
A nyone who has followed the career of Kevin Williamson should be prepared to jump a little. The first of the iconic Scream franchise made his name in the mid- 90s while later penmanship on the likes of I Know What You Did Last Summer, Cursed and The Faculty has resulted in cinema audiences getting the bejesus scared out of them. And it’s the same old story with the latest chapter in a patchier TV oeuvre which kicked off in 1998 with the rather lighter Dawson’s Creek right up to current teen horror/soap Vampire Diaries.
Even before you know a single thing about The Following (it centres on an escaped serial killer and the troubled former FBI agent who is back on the case to try and re-snare his man), this Sky Atlantic series is instantly notable for being the first TV show to have Kevin Bacon as its lead actor. This is a man so legendary he’s had a parlour game named after him (Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon). ‘About three or four years ago I realised that there was a trend towards great writing for television,’ states Bacon. ‘All of the things I talk to my friends about were “water cooler” shows like Game of Thrones, The Killing,
‘Maybe it’s time for me to throw my hat in the ring and do television’
Homeland and Breaking Bad. So I said, “maybe it’s time for me to throw my hat in the ring and do television?” Within two weeks, I had read three of the best scripts I’d ever read – and they were all TV pilots; all were well written with super cool characters.’ Bacon’s super cool character is Ryan Hardy, a functioning alcoholic (we know this as he goes on a helicopter ride with a pounding vodka hangover) who once wrote a book about Joe Carroll (James Purefoy), the man he helped put behind bars. This charismatic English literature lecturer’s Edgar Allan Poe obsession led to him slaughtering 14 women before taking out their eyes (a reference to the peeper-