THE FOLLOWING at TCA: Live-Blog

THE FOLLOWING cast and producers will be at Press Tour to talk about the new season of the show. Follow along for the latest…

2:51 PM: Kevin Williamson says he feels the show is a bit less violent than last year. He points out he never wants to be “gore for the sake of gore.”

2:52 PM: James Purefoy admits he lied to some people when he said he was dead — “I always knew I was going to live.”

2:53 PM: “I think we find out in season 2 that a lot of us have masks that we’re living,” Kevin Bacon says. He notes that Joe is “sadly the most important thing in [Ryan’s] life.”

2:54 PM: “The first episode, we answer Claire’s fate in the first minutes of the show,” Williamson says.

2:55 PM: “I never count on surviving one week to the next,” Valorie Curry says. But when Emma is shown in season 2, she has a wildly drastic look, which takes several hours for them to put her through.

2:58 PM: Connie Nielsen says her character is an “international woman whose lifestyle spans the world.” Nielsen calls her complex and says she’s been enjoying what she gets to do.

2:59 PM: Bacon says when he originally read the pilot script, he was surprised by multiple things and he was surprised it would be on Fox. He hoped people would respond to it the same way he did. That being said, he thinks “you’d have to be crazy” to expect any show to do well…the bar is set very high these days. But the fact that people found it and embraced it is gratifying to him.

3:01 PM: Williamson says the writers try and split every season into 15 mini-movies. But because of the pace and suspense of the show, fans shouldn’t necessarily expect for Joe to survive the whole time if the show goes nine seasons.

3:03 PM: “I think people are really fascinated by psychopaths,” Purefoy says. Most people don’t follow it through, he points out, but at the same time they can often have those thoughts.

3:04 PM: Curry says that Emma is really a polarizing character, because some people can see the victim in her, and others can’t. But she points out those layers are what makes playing Emma fun.

3:06 PM: To get around the “cops are idiots who can’t catch the bad guys” problem from season 1, these year, the FBI is mostly taken out of the equation. Williamson allows that a lot of the criticism about that last year was fair.

3:07 PM: Is Ryan going to be broken this season? Williamson says yes and no. There’s still a huge amount of inner struggle, and the addition of Jessica Stroup’s Max, whom is Ryan’s niece, helps him. Max and Mike form Ryan’s family.

3:09 PM: “Max is a lot more of who I actually am,” Stroup says of taking a role post-90210. She was a huge fan of THE FOLLOWING, but when she auditioned, she saw a ton of other girls and got nervous. She jokes she can pull off holding a gun “because I’m from the South.”

3:11 PM: “Clearly we needed to bring in new characters because we killed them all,” Williamson half-jokes of a whole slew of new people.

3:13 PM: After Bacon and Purefoy admit they get nightmares from the show, but Nielsen and Curry say they sleep fine. Sam Underwood says he took sleeping pills after reading a script, and had super weird dreams.

3:15 PM: Stroup pointed to a specific episode (7) as being a really disturbing one that got to her more than anything else.

3:16 PM: What does Williamson feel the show is about? “I think the show is about Ryan Hardy, and about his search in life to find his reason to live,” he says. It’s about second acts and second comings and “trying to find their place and their mark on this planet.” He notes that even psychopaths are evolving, and this is just one story that “hints at the insanity…this is the new world that we live in.”

3:20 PM: Bacon says he feels a responsibly for the show: for it to be good, for it to be viable, for it to stay on the air.

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And that’s it! Thanks for following along.