TV GUIDE: The Monday Playlist: Sleepy Hollow, Bones, Dome Finale, Dancing, a New Daytime Queen
Sep 16, 2013
by Matt Roush
... Heads will roll — and more than a few eyes — in Fox's lavishly entertaining but hopelessly convoluted new supernatural thriller Sleepy Hollow (Monday, 9/8c), which officially kicks off a new season of network premieres. Given how ordinary so many of the networks' new shows are this fall, it seems a bit churlish not to wholeheartedly embrace a series that is anything but ordinary. And yet by the end of an opening hour that gets off to a spectacularly fun start, I wanted nothing more than for it to just shut up with all of the apocalyptic mumbo jumbo.
On the plus side, a star is unquestionably born in Tom Mison, a winning British actor who makes for a dashing and amusing action hero in this bold re-imagining of Washington Irving's iconic Ichabod Crane (from The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, which we've heretofore seen Disney-fied and Tim Burton-ized). Here conceived as a studly Revolutionary War hero and spy for General George Washington, this Ichabod is mysteriously resurrected into the 21st century, along with the axe-wielding Headless Horseman who cut him down 250 years ago and is soon lopping off heads in the modern-day Hollow. There's great humor in Crane's disoriented bewilderment at his fish-out-of-water situation — when he sees a Starbucks on every block, he muses, "Is there a law?" — which escalates into indignant exasperation when he is jailed and grilled by the overwhelmed local police force. Soon, he's bonding with ambitious local deputy Abbie Mills (Nicole Beharie), who can't quite believe this character but can't deny him either, because of eerie happenings in her own past. And, you know, the horrifying beheadings.
So far so good, but you may echo Abbie's skeptical "C'mon!" when it's revealed that the Headless Horseman is one of the legendary Four Horsemen of the You-Know-What, and that Crane's wife (seen in visions and flashbacks) was a witch and part of an ancient order pledged to ... blah blah, curse/fate-of-mankind/destiny/evil blah-blah. The more seriously Sleepy Hollow seems to take itself, the more it threatens to become the next Zero Hour. And you can't get more hollow than that. But there's no way I won't be watching the next few episodes, hoping that the suspenseful mirth outweighs the ponderous mythology...
CLICK HERE TO VIEW A VIDEO NEW SERIES PROMO FROM FOX
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