After much speculation about “The Following” and whether or not the show will be coming back for a fourth season, it was finally announced that it was cancelled for good and the producers won’t get a chance to deliver any more episodes. There was a lot of commotion among fans surrounding the cancellation rumors, and many people obviously didn’t want to see this happen, and some even started an online petition hoping to change the mind of FOX.
And while it’s commonly accepted that Internet petitions do little good in such cases, FOX allegedly recently hinted that this could have actually worked if fans had been a bit more active. This might be a bit of a kick in the gut for fans of the show who were actively spreading news of the petition, sharing it on social media and collecting signatures, as according to the rumors, they were expecting more activity on the petition if they were to consider reviving the show.
Meanwhile, producers have been trying to find another network to take on the show, but there has been no success on that front. Hulu and Netflix were two candidates that were seen as very good choices and fans were expecting to see success with at least one of them, but in the end no other network wanted to take the production and it was left at the mercy of its original home.
So, at this point, fans of “The Following” should just accept the fact that the show isn’t coming back, and enjoy the good run that it had while it lasted. It’s definitely true that “The Following” was highly successful during its presence on the screen, at least among its fans, as it managed to establish a loyal base of followers who actively looked for new episodes and waited for the producers to come out with news.
With that in mind, it was a bit surprising to see the petition for its revival failing so badly. While FOX were apparently looking to get signatures to the tune of 25,000, they only got about 13,000 in the end, which to them was an obvious indication of a lack of interest, and they decided to cancel the production for good as a result.
Where were all the show’s active fans during that time, and why didn’t the petition get more attention? Many were convinced that they would not only reach the target number of signatures, but they would shoot past it as well, showing FOX clearly that they want to see the show returning on air.
After all was said and done though, a different picture was painted and it became apparent that not so many people are interested in seeing “The Following” coming back for a fourth season. There have also been suspicions of vote manipulation, with some fans claiming that FOX simply weren’t interested in doing anything with the show and so they just claimed that they didn’t get enough signatures, but that might be stretching the story a bit too far.
In any case, we wouldn’t be surprised if a show similar to “The Following” came up on television after a while, be it on the same network or a different one. This kind of storyline has an obvious potential and the producers of the show did a great job bringing their characters to life and telling all the stories they wanted to tell in fine detail.