Yeah, okay, I get it.  My love for “The Following” should be considered a guilty pleasure, and not anything that would distinguish me as a connoisseur of great television.  Smarter friends than I am have repeatedly pointed out the newly cancelled program’s flaws; I myself have been able to notice weaknesses such as redundant story arcs, predictable plot points and occasionally spotty acting.

I’ve still got to give this show a 9 out of 10, simply because I enjoyed it so much — and I know one or two others who enjoyed it as well.  I’d be lying if I gave a negative review to a TV show if I kept counting the days until the next episode.

I still think this show really shined sometimes, and served up a fast-paced battle between FBI agents and serial killers that was great, episodic, horror-thriller fun.  As far as I am aware, there really wasn’t anything else on television that was quite like this.

I thought Season 3 began in a lackluster fashion.  Kyle and Daisy were flat and uninteresting characters; Mark was growing stale with his overdone split-personality shtick.  (I really missed Lily Gray and Emma from past seasons.)  Too much dialogue focused on these characters squabbling.  It did little to advance the story, and the show lacked momentum.  Yet again, the show resorted to melodramatic dialogue that beat us over the head with the news about a new big-bad being THE MOST HORRIFYING SERIAL KILLER YET.  (That well is one to which they returned a little too often.)

Then … things quickly got better.  Kyle and Daisy started taking shape; their tension with Mark became interesting.  The new villain actually became … the most horrifying serial killer yet, in some ways, as the show seemed to promise.  “Box-Man” still freaks me out, and I am surprised at the pathos that the writers must have called upon to invent his modus operandi.  The pacing improved immediately, and the screenwriters returned to doing what they had a pretty good track record for — portraying interesting and sometimes frightening bad guys.

The last major big-bad that we get to know was expertly played by Michael Ealy.  The character of Joe Carroll, by this point, had grown into a foppish caricature, which is a shame, because he was a great antagonist at first.  I blame the screenwriters for overdoing his dialogue, but I still think some blame should go to the otherwise wonderful James Purefoy’s overacting.  Where Carroll became an effete oaf, Ealy’s new villain was a controlled, calculating bad guy that seemed like a KGB agent right out of a Tom Clancy novel.  It was a game changer that really made the show great in Season 3’s later episodes.

It was also great seeing an ostensibly nerdy African American computer programmer portrayed as a master serial killer.  Here the writers were playing against type.  I was taught as an undergraduate that most identified serial killers are white males with less education (a major exception being the Atlanta Child Murderer), although this might be due to less diligent investigation and reporting by law enforcement agencies.

The ultimate arrival of the character of Iliza revealed a possible story arc reminiscent of the terrific “Hostel” horror movies.  Maybe that’s derivative, but it could still be great fun — especially considering key choices made by one main character in the last episode.  It’s a bummer that “The Following” was cancelled before we could see how that played out.