The B-Movie Charms of "Sleepy Hollow"

I'm still working up to that "Dads" rant, so let's tackle the new FOX supernatural show "Sleepy Hollow" first. A few spoilers for the pilot ahead.

Following on the unlikely success of high-concept shows like "Grimm," FOX has put together its own fantasy procedural with familiar genre names Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci, and Len Wiseman. They've "reimagined" "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," so now Ichabod Crane (Tom Mison) is a Revolutionary spy and soldier for George Washington, and his lovely wife Katrina (Katia Winter) is a nurse. After falling in battle, Crane is awoken from the grave after 250 years, to modern-day upstate New York to continue his fight with the also resurrected Headless Horseman, who Crane previously beheaded. Joining him is a black female police lieutenant, Abbie Mills (Nicole Behari), trying to solve a series of recent murders.

Torrents of exposition are shoehorned into the pilot to explain the increasingly silly scenario that the Headless Horseman is really one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse from Revelations, and the little town of Sleepy Hollow is the epicenter of a centuries-long battle for the fate of humanity between the forces of light and dark. Opposing covens of witches are quickly mentioned, who I'm sure we'll be spending more time getting to know in the weeks to come. Mills also had an encounter with a dark spirit when she was a child, giving her a personal connection to these events. However, the bulk of the pilot focuses on maneuvering Crane and Mills into their unlikely long-term partnership against the things that go bump in the night.

The first half of the hour is a lot of fun, introducing Mison's charming fish-out-of-water Crane, who everyone thinks must be crazy. However, he's so lucid and intelligent, and self-possessed, it's easy to be won over by him. So it's believable that Mills would eventually come around and start taking his ridiculous explanations seriously. Mison has all the fun stuff with Ichabod Crane, mistaking Mills for an emancipated slave and making observations about Starbucks, but Behari's performance is the vital one. She's provides a strong grounding element amidst all the fantastic silliness, a real person we can are about. Without her, the show wouldn't work. Katia Winter doesn't get to do much but look winsome in a low cut dress, and the only other regular so far is Orlando Jones as Mills' superior, Captain Frank Irving, a typical hard case.

There's a lot of action in the pilot, mostly in the second half, but it's so cartoonish and low-stakes that it's not much fun to watch. The Horseman bloodlessly chops guest stars' heads off, gravity-defying magic makes objects whiz through the air, and there are some pretty tame horrorshow jump scares. What's the point of broadswords and Biblical references if the violence isn't allowed to get properly medieval? We get a lot of the usual B-movie horror elements, but "Sleepy Hollow" is no "Hannibal," and isn't really interested in being frightening or pushing at network content limits. The show's attitude is far too slick for that, clearly more interested in coolness than creeps. In other words, it's exactly what you would expect from the man who made the "Underworld" movies.

Fortunately the writing's not bad, despite the ludicrous plotting. The main characters are established well, the banter's cute, Crane's commentary on the modern world is fun, and the humor is all-around more effective than any of the action or the thrills. The quips are just clever enough to pass muster, though Ichabod Crane handles the culture shock a little too well. I found the treatment of the existing "Sleepy Hollow" characters pretty terrible - wasn't Ichabod Crane supposed to be a coward? And they couldn't have worked in Brom Bones somehow? The series seems to be based on the 1999 Tim Burton "Sleepy Hollow" movie more than the original Washington Irving story, and many period details have clearly been fudged. Then again, I doubt Revolutionary War Era America is going to play much of a role in future episodes anyway.

I'm curious as to what a regular episode of the show is going to look like - the "Sleepy Hollow" pilot was full of expensive stunts they're surely not going to be able to pull off every week, and that Headless Horseman is going to stop being effective pretty quick if overused. The pilot was entertaining enough for what it was, but it's not sustainable. I wouldn't be surprised if this metamorphoses into a much smaller scale light mystery show, sort of a super campy "X-Files" lite. Considering all the talk about witches, we'll probably see "Sleepy Hollow" treading some of the same thematic ground as FX's upcoming "American Horror Story: Coven" this year. That could be fun week to week, but we'll have to see how it develops.

Happy watching.
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