‘The Following’ season 3 premiere spoilers: On the change in overall violence

We have to admit that there were a few assorted moments during “The Following” season 2 that we did not even really know what we were watching anymore. How in the world did something so violent get on network TV? We’re not so much opposed to graphic violence being presented; there just has to be a reason for it, and there were times when it felt like the show was giving us so much carnage just for the shock value of it all.

We are rather pleased that there is at least some sort of movement away from that in the upcoming third season, which premieres on Fox Monday night. The show is still going to be insane, but it may be a little less gratuitous overall. According to what executive producer Marcos Siega said to The Hollywood Reporter, much of the reason for that seems to be listening to some diehard fans of the show, who were not entirely on board with the overall level of mayhem that was present during the second batch of episodes:

“The single biggest change is that we are just looking at how effective that [violence] is or isn’t, and I don’t like the idea of turning an audience off. You know, there’s a very small group of our audience that can actually tolerate that amount of violence. (Laughs) Look, we got criticism for it last year, and [this isn’t] just us responding to critics saying it’s too violent; it genuinely came from people who I think would genuinely enjoy our show hearing too much negativity about the violence and not giving us a chance. And I love the show, and Kevin Bacon has invested so much in this, and Kevin Williamson has invested so much in this, we’re just kind of going, ‘Let’s give them the same show, but let’s be aware.’ And I don’t see that as a compromise because the show hasn’t changed. It’s just we know what really didn’t work last year for our fans.”

Williamson has already left this show’s day-to-day duties in order to work on “Stalker” over on CBS. With that, we are interested in learning just how this impacts the creative vision as a whole. We know that Joe Carroll will be gone (at least at first) and there will be different villains. We will just have to see overall if everything plays out in a very different fashion.