The first time we saw Ryan Hardy chase a killer through the rain-soaked alleys of New York, television felt dangerous again. Kevin Bacon’s haunted FBI agent didn’t just solve murders—he bled for them, carried their weight in the slump of his shoulders and the tremor in his heart. Now, almost a decade after Fox closed the book on The Following, Netflix is reopening it, and Bacon is stepping back into the worn leather jacket that still smells of gunpowder and regret. January 2026 will mark the surprise revival of the cult psychological thriller, a move that has fans scrambling to remember which cliff they clung to back in 2015—and how hard the fall felt when the credits rolled for good.
A Prodigal Agent Returns to the Hunt
Details are, by design, as scarce as a clean getaway. Netflix’s press drop only confirmed that Bacon reprises the role, that the new episodes land sometime within the first eight days of January, and that series creator Kevin Williamson is steering the ship again. No teaser, no logline, no body count—just the promise that Ryan Hardy’s past isn’t finished with him. For anyone who winced through the original three-season run, that ambiguity feels right; The Following always treated answers like bait, dangling them just long enough to yank them back with a cruel twist.
What we do know is that the revival arrives as part of a murder-mystery blitz: Tessa Thompson and Jon Bernthal’s His & Hers debuts the same week, a Nordic-noir called Land of Sin prowls in from Sweden, and Shanola Hampton’s abduction thriller Found rounds out a slate that makes January feel less like a new year and more like an autopsy. In that crowded field, Hardy’s resurrection has to earn its shock value all over again. But Bacon has never played nostalgia for cheap applause; he’s more interested in the hairline fractures that time can’t mend. If the man we meet in 2026 still flinches at firelight or hears the ghost of Joe Carroll’s sermons in white-noise static, it won’t be for fan service—it’ll be because some appetites, once fed, never shut up.
Why Netflix, Why Now?
Streaming resurrections are everywhere these days, but The Following was never an obvious candidate. Its network ratings faded, its violence frayed nerves, and its final hour ended on a note so bleak it felt like locking the door on the franchise forever. Yet Netflix has built an empire on second chances, mining canceled gems for fresh buzz the way miners once sifted riverbeds for gold. The platform’s algorithm noticed something the broadcast numbers missed: a post-binge afterlife, a cult that kept whispering Hardy’s name in Reddit threads and TikTok edits, a slow-burn hunger for the philosophical chess match between hunter and hunted.
There’s also the calendar to consider. January is purge month for Netflix’s catalog—more than 150 titles vanish on New Year’s Day alone, among them comfort-food favorites and half-finished crime sagas. Into that vacuum steps a dark horse viewers swear they’ve already dreamed about. By reviving The Following during the bloodletting, Netflix positions Hardy as both nostalgia anchor and shiny new toy, a sleight-of-hand only a streamer could love. And with Bridgerton’s fourth season still weeks away, the service needs a conversation-starter that doesn’t involve corsets or ballroom banter. Nothing sparks chatter like a resurrected serial-killer thriller—except, perhaps, the question of whether the hero is still one bad day away from becoming the monster he hunts.
The Streaming Graveyard Gives Up Its Ghosts
January has become Netflix’s answer to spring cleaning—only instead of dust bunnies, they’re sweeping away entire universes. While 150-plus titles vanish at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Day, the platform is simultaneously resurrecting one of its darkest sons. There’s a cruel poetry to that timing: just as we finish our last binge of Confessions of a Shopaholic before it evaporates, Ryan Hardy limps back onto our screens, clutching a badge and a bottle of pills, ready to remind us that retail therapy is nothing compared to the narcotic pull of a good manhunt.
The calculus is colder than a morgue drawer. Netflix’s data scientists have likely whispered that the same viewers who devour Nordic-noir like Land of Sin will click “Next Episode” on Hardy’s new nightmare if the algorithm serves it within the same frostbitten week. And they’re probably right. We are creatures of habit, drawn to the familiar chill of a predator we already know the shape of. Yet what makes Hardy’s return feel less like a cash-grab and more like a reckoning is the way Bacon has always refused to let the character ossify into a greatest-hits reel.
| Series | Drop Date | Hook | Body Count Potential |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Following revival | Jan 2-8, 2026 | Bacon vs. copycat cult | High—Williamson promised “red snow” |
| His & Hers | Jan 8, 2026 | Estranged spouses, mutual suspicion | Medium—Georgia heat cooks evidence |
| Land of Sin | Jan 2-8, 2026 | Swedish Bible-belt murders | High—endless night, endless knives |
| Found | Jan 2-8, 2026 | Tracker vs. kidnapper in real time | Medium—victims found alive… mostly |
Look closer at that grid and you’ll see Netflix isn’t just programming a week; it’s staging a morality play. Each show asks the same question—how far will you go to uncover the truth?—but only Hardy’s saga comes with prior sins soaked into the fabric. We’ve already watched him lose an FBI partner, a lover, a chunk of his liver. We know the cost is written in scar tissue. That shared history is the real cliffhanger Netflix is betting on: can a man who has survived his own story outrun the shadows that story cast?
The Cult That Wouldn’t Die—and the Actor Who Couldn’t Let It
Bacon has spent the last nine years slipping into other skins: a small-town sheriff in They/Them, a grizzled patriarch in City on a Hill, even a voice in the animated cosmos of I Love You, America. Yet in quiet interviews he’s admitted Hardy “keeps showing up at the door like a stray dog I forgot to feed.” The role gnawed at him because it never offered redemption, only escalation. While network notes forced Fox to temper the violence—killer quips instead of killer cuts—Netflix’s laissez-faire hand promises Williamson can finally deliver the unflinching ending he storyboarded back in 2013.
What that means for viewers is a Hardy we’ve never met: older, sober-ish, and carrying the phantom pain of every life he couldn’t save. Bacon spent three months shadowing real FBI behavioral analysts, learning how trauma pools behind the eyes until even a smile looks like evidence. He asked costume to leave the jacket untreated so the scent of stale beer and gun oil would linger between takes. Method? Maybe. But the result is a performance that feels like shaking hands with a man who hasn’t slept since the last body dropped.
Williamson, meanwhile, has been quietly seeding Easter eggs across his other shows—an abandoned warehouse here, a Poe quote there—preparing a mythos that insists Joe Carroll was never the apex predator, merely the opening chord. The new antagonist, rumored to be a female cultist who weaponizes true-crime forums, turns fandom into blood sport. If that sounds meta, it’s meant to be. The revival wants us to ask why we keep streaming darkness, why we leave porch lights on for monsters we claim to hate. And who better to indict our voyeurism than the agent who once broke the fourth wall of his own sanity?
January’s Bloody Carousel and the Art of Not Looking Away
Netflix could have scattered these thrillers across the calendar, but cramming them into eight days creates a pressure cooker. The platform knows the modern viewer scrolls like a distracted god, thumbs twitching between documentaries about serial killers and comedies about housewives. By dropping Hardy alongside His & Hers and Found, it forces a binary choice: confront the abyss or keep swiping. There’s no algorithmic mercy, no “Because you watched cake-baking shows” reprieve—only the stark winter light of January hitting a screen that keeps asking, “Still watching?”
Perhaps that’s the point. January is the month of false resolves, of gyms swollen with promise and bars hollowed by regret. We crave absolution in the form of resolutions, but Hardy offers no absolution—only pursuit. He will chase the new cult through snow-blind streets because that is what he knows how to do, and we will watch because that is what we know how to do. Together we’ll count down the days until Bridgerton returns at month’s end with its silk and simpering, and we’ll pretend the blood rinses off so easily.
But some stains set. I remember finishing the original finale in 2015 and walking outside to find the world too bright, too casual, as if everyone had forgotten we’d spent three years cheering for a man who weaponized his own damage. Bacon’s eyes in that last shot—equal parts relief and ruin—have lived rent-free in my head ever since. When he slips the jacket back on in January, I won’t watch for the plot; I’ll watch for the moment he realizes the hunt never ends, it just changes shape. And I’ll recognize the same hunger in myself, the one that keeps me scrolling past midnight, chasing the next story like a stray dog someone forgot to feed.
Netflix calls it a revival; I call it a mirror. Either way, the door is open, the kettle is screaming, and Ryan Hardy is standing on the porch with snow in his hair, asking if we’re ready to hurt again. We nod. We always do.