the following

tv:  Last night on FOX the new show The Following aired its pilot.  There was a lot of talk about this show leading up to its airing.  This show was being talked about as the first network show to approach the kind of excellent and envelope pushing dramas we see on cable such as Breaking Bad, Dexter, Mad Men, Game Of Thrones, and many others.  It was supposed to be a new look for network television; more violent, more intense subject matter, better acting (they got Kevin Bacon!) and just a general jump into the realm of cable drama for a network.
The Following is a serial killer drama about FBI detective Ryan Hardy, played by Bacon, who is out of work when the show picks up but is called back in to help with a manhunt.  The hunt is for that of killer Joe Carroll, whom Hardy caught once before but is now escaped from prison.  The first episode follows Hardy as he tracks down his nemesis and ends with him catching him.  Carroll then tells Hardy that there is greater scheme at work since he developed a cult following (hence the title, clever eh?) that is going to continue to kill in his place and force and very Lecter/Clarice through the glass wall relationship between he and Hardy.  Thus the show now seems as if it will be about Hardy and the FBI tracking down these cult members who are disciples of Carrolls while following his breadcrumb clues.
I suppose this seems like a decent enough idea.  Bacon is a good actor (anyone laughing right now shouldn't, I dare you to find one movie he's ever been in where you think "man Kevin Bacon sucked"). The serial killer drama could be fertile ground for a good show, especially one on a network looking to establish itself as on par with the cable channels given its subject matter.
But it just didn't quite get there.  The show was certainly more violent than anything that has ever been shown on network.  It was also dark enough and had a few moments of genuine suspense to make viewers jump.  But watching the pilot, there became on very glaring place in which this was still just another show that can't live up to its piers.  And that was in the pilot itself.
The pilot begins with Carroll's prison break and Hardy rolling out of bed to a water bottle full of vodka and ends with the capture of Carroll and his monologue about his followers that set up the rest of the series.  I know this may be holding certain shows to an impossibly high standard, but if this were Breaking Bad that would have been the entire first season.  We would have gotten a full hour devoted to how prison break happened that established Carroll's being a criminal mastermind and the out of control life of Hardy before he got dragged back in.  Then a few more episodes devoted to the sudden emergence of Carroll's followers while Hardy picks his investigation and reestablishes relationships with people from his past rather than doing flashback shortcuts.  The rest of the story would have continured till the moment we were floored by the fact that the show going into its second season was going to be about something entirely different from what we had seen which was the story of the manhunt.  Instead, creator Kevin Williamson and FOX decided to write the same old episode we have seen before a hundred times and have discarded nearly that many.
Forget the mind numbing literary themes that the writers bullshit their way through as Carroll's motivations for being a killer that are so unoriginal that a shitty John Cusack movie was made about them last year (really?  The Raven?).  The Following just failed to deliver on its promise of being the cable show on network television.  Despite the fact that FOX is airing the show in fifteen episode seasons.  I think they are only doing that because that's how the networks that win all the awards are doing it, just like they made it more violent because these cable shows are bloodier than what they show.  But it seems like everyone missed the most important aspect of these shows.
Breaking Bad isn't what it is because the characters can swear or because of drugs and violence.  It is great because it takes its time.  Taking its time does not mean slow.  It means that it is willing to not rush itself so that it can imbed the kind of detail that allows you to have a perfect grasp of everything going on in the world you are asked to inhabit.  To show you a killer at work and to show how broken a man can really be in this specific case.  Despite it not being my favorite part of the show, Breaking Bad is what it is because it was willing to spend eight gut-wrenching, borderline unwatchable hours with Walt dealing with his cancer before deciding to get involved in the drug game.  It later spent a whole episode drawing out every detail of a train heist that is one of the great capers caught on film.
My hope for The Following is that years from now it will be viewed as the stepping stone for a brighter future for networks where they realized that they were capable of making shows that compete with cable.  But until they realize that the attention to detail and willingness to take their time is where these great shows stand out for their great story telling and not in their shock factor, they will be nothing more than a stepping stone, they will never be the great show they aspired to be.