A creepy new TV series, engrossing police drama and yet another red-carpet awards show are our picks for the best in entertainment this week.

MONDAY: 'The Following'
The trailer for "The Following" makes the new FOX drama look like a big-screen movie. It stars Kevin Bacon, a major name in his own right, and the plot will remind you of a good old-fashioned action-horror movie, where one retired FBI agent returns to hunt down the serial killer he caught once before. Bacon plays the agent, Ryan Hardy, and James Purefoy plays Joe Carroll, the murderous college professor whose creepy Manson-like followers are willing to take over the killing for him. (Premieres Jan. 21, 9 p.m., FOX.)

TUESDAY: 'End of Watch' on home video
Jake Gyllenhaal read the "End of Watch" script in an hour and immediately declared he wanted to star in it, reports Collider.com.  Gyllenhaal plays Officer Brian Taylor in the indie cop drama, with Michael Pena as his partner, Mike Zavala. The two run afoul of a Mexican drug cartel in Los Angeles and soon find themselves in a tangled situation they can't escape. Roger Ebert called it "one of the best police movies in recent years." (On DVD and Blu-ray Jan. 22.)

SUNDAY: Screen Actors Guild Awards
Yes, all these awards shows are just warm-ups for the granddaddy of them all, the Academy Awards on Feb. 24. But all of them offer their own share of glitzy gowns, heart-warming or stumbly speeches and deserving winners, plus those who got robbed.  Like the Golden Globes, the Screen Actors Guild Awards cover both movies and television. On the movies side, "Lincoln," "Silver Linings Playbook" and "Les Miserables" lead all nominees with four apiece. The only television show to match that number is "Modern Family." Dick Van Dyke will receive the organization's life achievement award. Somehow we don't think his acceptance speech will make headlines in quite the way Jodie Foster's did. (Jan. 27, 8 p.m., TNT and TBS.)

Related content:

• Creator says 'Following' is a 'horrific, scary show'
• 'Lincoln,' 'Les Mis' top Screen Actors Guild nominations
• Affleck, Argo, 'Les Mis' have Golden night at the Globes

Open Road Films

Michael Pena and Jake Gyllenhaal in "End of Watch."

REVIEW: David Ayer's South Central-set cop film "End of Watch" feels like the work of a man who, after relishing venal and brutal policework in his scripts for "Training Day" and "Dark Blue,"  has come to identify with, and maybe love, the L.A.P.D. Here, L.A.'s finest may work in a world of cut corners and bad attitudes, but they're the good guys, and damned if you're not going to accept it. Vigorously capturing the tension of walking into situations that could be deadly, horrifying, or both, it has a strong commercial appeal despite some shortcomings.

"End of Watch" trailer: Jake Gyllenhaal, Michael Pena are endangered L.A. cops (Video)

It's hard at first to figure out what Ayer thinks of his protagonist Officer Taylor (Jake Gyllenhaal), a macho "ghetto street cop" whose plan to make a documentary about life on the force (he carries a camera along on his beat and in the police house, to the chagrin of colleagues) looks less journalistic than narcissistic. The voiceover with which he opens "End of Watch" starts off street-tough, then pivots: "beyond my badge is a heart like yours," he says, continuing to speak of his inner yearnings. David Sardy's score turns melodramatic alongside him, sounding like ironic commentary on this self-aggrandizement, but eventually it's clear Ayer's film buys what Taylor's selling. Viewers may too, as Gyllenhaal thoroughly inhabits this problematic personality.

Michael Peña's Officer Zavala, though matching his partner for general wiseassery, has a much smaller chip on his shoulder. (As in "World Trade Center,"  where he was married to a Gyllenhaal instead of manning a squad car with one, Peña shows he has mastered the "Latino partner loyal to Caucasian hero" role. It's time for him to graduate.)

Having just returned from leave after killing two subjects in the course of duty (it was a clean shooting, everyone agrees), Taylor and Zavala are even higher-profile at the precinct house than usual. A pair of no-nonsense female cops (America Ferrera and Cody Horn) resent their attitude; a disgruntled veteran (David Harbour) resents their self-satisfaction. But though the energy and direction of some patrol encounters might have viewers expecting these cops to be (or soon become) involved in something crooked, the worst you can say about them is, like practically every cop in film history, they don't play by the rules.

Here, ignoring the rules -- following up on leads that should be passed along to detectives -- opens a window into the grisly north-of-the-border activities of a Mexican drug cartel. "The cartels" hover unseen above the action here (until the third act), raising a question: If they decide to expand their presence, can they wreak as much havoc in the States as they have in Mexico? Nobody voices that concern, but way they say the words suggests they don't assume an easy victory.

PHOTOS: THR and Samsung host "End of Watch" screening

While we don't see the cartels, we do meet some American aspirants to their level of terror-fueled success as the film eavesdrops on some Latino youths called the Curbside Gang. If these killers look more like sketches for post-Cartel gang stereotypes instead of believable humans, that irritant is compounded by the fact that they, too, are filming everything they do. Scenes of self-documentation are so common in the movie's beginning (is "End of Watch" a misnomer when everybody's watching himself?) that we expect Ayer to make something of it in the end.

Ayer drops that ball, if he ever meant to carry it somewhere. And in the last 15 minutes of the film, he burns up some of the credibility he established by not pushing extreme situations too far earlier on. But he has managed to involve us in the lives of his characters -- whose storylines may be familiar (as in Taylor's romance with smart outsider Janet, played charmingly by Anna Kendrick), but are played out in a world that for the most part feels real.

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Open Road

Jake Gyllenhaal, left, and Michael Peña in "End of Watch."

Jake Gyllenhaal managed to dupe a few cops into thinking he was part of the force on the set of his upcoming film, “End of Watch,” in which he portrays an LAPD officer.

The 31-year-old actor, who took on five months of training and shaved his head for the role, was apparently so convincing with his insider lingo, his director, David Ayer, said a bonafide street team couldn’t tell the difference.

In an interview with Yahoo! News, the filmmaker, who also wrote the cop movie “Training Day,” described the reality-style setup that led to the deception.

“The movie's 'found footage' shooting style required the camera crew to stay out of sight,” Ayer said. Thus, Gyllenhaal and actor Michael Peña, his partner in the film, performed their scenes unexposed. “There were times where Jake and Mike are in uniform in a marked police vehicle, and there were no cameras to indicate a movie was being filmed.”

Accordingly, the actors appeared to be policemen on the clock, and Gyllenhaal took advantage of the disguise.

Ayer explained, "Cops in L.A. will do a hand sign with four fingers to say 'everything's good.' Jake threw a 'code four' at some LAPD cops rolling by and they threw a 'Code Four' back.  I don't think they had any idea it was Jake Gyllenhaal!"

Shot on the streets of Los Angeles over five weeks, the film, opening in theaters Sept. 28, is the story of two young police officers who get in over their heads with a drug cartel. The film is inspired by true stories from a former LAPD gang officer. According to Yahoo!, Ayer said the cartel in the movie is his creation based on actual crime rings.

“There is a lot of cartel activity in the U.S., and Los Angeles especially because we're close to the border,” noted the director. “It is not uncommon for LAPD officers in South L.A. to run into cartel-affiliated people."

The first trailer for the film was released through Yahoo! on May 3, and from the looks of it, there’s a lot of shooting, a lot of banging down doors, and a very brutal murder that leads to trouble. In an interview with E! Online in August, Gyllenhaal and Ayer detailed the actor’s training regimen more specifically, noting the prep worked involved, “ride-a-longs, “tactical training and fight training” nearly every day.

Gyllenhaal told E!, “My goal for this is to not have any of that stuff [Hollywood] in the mix. Ironically when you show up in a police uniform in a police car, people don’t tend to recognize you. It is, in a way, like a batsuit. It has that effect.”

The LAPD might agree.

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