Geekscape TV Review: ‘Sleepy Hollow’

Sleepy Hollow Pulls Ahead

Sleepy Hollow, the new genre-tastic show from the powerhouse team of Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman (Fringe, Star Trek: Into Darkness) along with Phillip Iscove and Len Wiseman, and starring fan favorites John Cho, Orlando Jones and Clancy Brown, with Nicole Beharie (42) and Tom Mison (Salman Fishing on the Yemen), premiered last night on Fox to a whopping 10 million viewers—a 3.4 rating among adults 18-49–making it Fox’s highest rated Fall drama premiere in six years.

And let’s hope that those numbers stick around, because the show looks to only get better once these world-building, exposition-laden episodes get out of the way (and they are pretty exposition-laden!).

Just a Story About a Guy, and a Girl,and a Headless Horseman…

Sleepy Hollow is a modern retelling of Washington Irving’s classic, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. But this one has a modern action flare right from the start. In the teaser opening, we meet Ichabod Crane (Mison) in 1781, busily—and quite handily—killing British soldiers in the Revolutionary War; in a rapid series of shots we see Crane kill the Horseman; the Horseman reviving only to slash Crane open; and Crane decapitating the Horseman; then, suddenly, we’re in modern day Sleepy Hollow and a dazed Crane is digging himself out of a grave and stumbling out into the fog, where he eventually meets up with Beharie, who plays Deputy Sheriff Abbie Mills, a sarcastic, ambitious, slightly pushy deputy sheriff who manages to remain likeable even while slogging through a number of the tepid, trope-heavy procedural scenes.

The first twenty minutes are engrossing, startling, funny, engaging and, quite honestly, great television. The show moves, the actors seem at home in their characters, the dialogue sparkles and pops, doling out enough information to move forward but never seeming forced or out of place. The first twenty minutes of Sleepy Hollow are pretty darn close to perfect television—the Starbucks conversation between Crane and Beharie is short, funny, blisteringly socially aware while also being deprecatingly self-aware and there’s only about five lines of dialogue. This is when Sleepy Hollow is at its best.

Series leads Mison and Beharie complement each other—on-screen together, they have the easy give and take of a long partnership, at times combative and other times comedic. Mison, in particular, portrays a man-out-of-his-time with wry humor and a bleak, buried sorrow that lends a gravity to him that would have been hard to manage in a lesser actor; Beharie inhabits her deputy-sheriff-with-a-past with a natural ease and great charm. The supporting cast—Cho, Jones and Brown—make the most of the limited screen time they have, and they all play off each other superbly, taking even some of the more monotonous lines and imbuing them with an honesty which enriches the whole show.

And Then Things Got a Little Weird

Unfortunately, after about twenty minutes, the show got pilot-itis, and started trying to explain itself. Three or four scenes in particular stand out for their overly-expositional, stridently info-dumping tone; which is so discordant when compared to rest of the episode, we can only assume  an executive at Fox got nervous, and started suggest/insist-ing that more exposition was needed—and those info-scenes got added to the detriment of others (i.e.: information is alluded to late in the episode that was never actual given during the episode itself, which smacks of a cut or deleted scene).  It may not be the nicest thing, to blame the Execs, but they can take the punch, since they still owe us all for cancelling Firefly.

It’s a pity, because what was good was so very, very good that the audience probably could have stood for being left a little confused longer—even two or three episodes in—in return for the quality remaining high throughout. Again, we’re going to blame the Fox executives for that. Since, you know, they cancelled Firefly.

Things got a little weird—there seems to be an odd blurring between the Sheriff’s office (usually an elected official beholden to a county council) and the police precinct; the Horseman turned in his axe, which was MAGIC, for a shotgun (which may also be magic…since the shells do burst into flame); George Washington is also apparently a supernatural/demon hunter; and the apocalypse figures in (don’t worry about being confused, because the show will spell that out for you three times before the end of the pilot).

And Then Clancy Brown Quoted the King James Bible

However, despite the occasional ‘what, wait?’ and the sudden onset of pilot-itis, there is an intriguing heart to Sleepy Hollow. The cast is invested and believable, there’s plenty of humor, the murder-mysteries could be intriguing, and the scare factor is definitely there (there is one scene, with a blurry demon…well, no spoilers. Just…phew…). Plus, you get a pretty hardcore “these bad guys mean business” ending.

The pilot is often the weakest episode in a show’s history—many successful shows have had problematic pilots. Sleepy Hollow has much more going for it than against it, and the second episode looks to be full of even more absurd odd couple/crime solving/Armageddon preventing adventure.

We don’t know about your Monday’s, but ours could do with a little more of that.

Sleepy Hollow airs Monday’s on Fox at 9 p.m; the pilot can be viewed online here.

Score:

Pilot Episode: 3.5/5

Overall Show: Possibly a 4, even a 4.5 out of 5. Excited to see how the  next few episodes do!