The Following to Follow Criminal Minds

Two of TV’s grisliest hours will screen back-to-back in HD from February 11, when TV One pairs The Following with Criminal Minds.

From the creator of the Scream horror franchise, Kevin Williamson, The Following stars Kevin Bacon as an ex-FBI agent who’s recruited to catch a serial killer nemesis (James Purefoy) with an Edgar Allan Poe bent and a legion of copycat killers who follow his every command.

The Following has been sharply criticised for violence that’s unprecedented for a free-to-air drama.

Normally a series this dark would screen on a cable TV channel in the US rather than a network like Fox (in the UK it screens on Sky Atlantic, on which SoHo was modelled).

USA Today dubbed it “one of the most violent, and certainly the most frightening, series ever made by a commercial broadcast network.

“In the first four episodes made available for preview, people are dispatched in any number of gruesome ways by dispatchers who engage in a peculiarly perverse form of blood lust — and who instill the palpable fear that something even worse could happen to anyone at any moment.”

And the New York Daily News warned of at least two scenes in the premiere “as violent and disturbing as anything you’ll see on Sons of Anarchy or Boardwalk Empire …

“If you can make it through Monday’s first episode … you have some intense, but high-quality, television ahead.”

But while most critics thought The Following worth following, The Hollywood Reporter condemned it for aping Criminal Minds and “simply trying to shock people with gratuitous, relentless carnage …

“No matter how you slice it, you won’t find a quality cable series hiding inside.”

The Following’s premiere spearheads an upsurge in free-to-air violence that week, with Sons of Anarchy continuing on Wednesday, the same night TV2 resurrects The Walking Dead.