SLEEPY HOLLOW

**1/2 (out of ****)

Sleepy Hollow is really the tale of two pilots. Sometimes it takes a show a couple of episodes to find their footing. Sometimes it’s an entire season. Sleepy Hollow sucks as much as you think it would for exactly 30 minutes, and then decides it’s all out of suck.

Crane v. Headless Horseman, 2013 edition, was a premise that literally no one was clamoring for. It’s like two showrunners looked at each other and said “We gotta create something!” and this is what they came up with. Then you find out the show is on FOX, and even though the premise of the show wouldn’t have been promising on any network, you think “Man! FOX! Shit!” It’s a very reasonable reaction. And throughout the first half of the show, you’d be so right, that self-satisfied smirk leaking grease across your fat fucking face. “I nailed you, FOX. I predicted this show would suck and does and I’m great.” Yes you are. But there’s a lot more to the premise than just another “boy meets headless boy.” A lot more. Maybe too much more. But you don’t get any idea in the first half.

Crane, a British Revolutionary soldier turned American spy (of course), beheads this big British monster, just as the monster slices Crane across the chest with an axe. They both fall down with boo-boos. Then they both wake up, in the same place they died, in 2013. Crane gets arrested for talking like a fruitcake, HH runs around chopping off people’s heads, probably jealous. Same-old same-old. The problem here, besides wondering why any of this is going on (both in the reality of the show, and our reality) is that Ichabod Crane claims he is 250 years old. Now we have to spend X amount of time knowing he’s telling the truth, while watching no one else believe him. The insane asylum, the eye-rolling cops, the one girl that believes him a little bit — it’s all here. And we, as the audience, knows that they will believe him in time, and we just have to sit here and watch. It’s boring and I hate it. And Sleepy Hollow barely lifts a finger to spice things up. Then, without warning, the show decides it’s convinced at least one character enough, if not everyone. Suddenly, without warning, things go apeshit in all of the best ways possible.

What was once a show based on a Disney cartoon we think we saw one time becomes a story with links to George Washington, the bible, and the Salem witch trials. Even the Horseman has a reason he’s a Horseman, having a relation to another Horseman (hopefully that didn’t give anything away). There’s fucking buried heads and bitten thumbs and psychic crow friends. Once the Horseman started packing a giant machine gun and started destroying everything in its path, I stood up and screamed “SOLD!” at the top of my lungs. Once again, we have a pilot, even one with one of the dumbest premises in recent memory, that has to do some stupid shit to establish plot and characters before they can give a fucking machine gun to the Headless fuckin’ Horseman. YEE-HAW! The second half of the pilot is dumb, but takes itself just seriously enough (or not seriously enough, depending how you look at it) to pull it off. There’s a lot of lore built up in this episode, but it had to, didn’t it? It had one hour to convince us there’s more to this story than the one it’s based on. The pilot plants about 30 seeds for future storylines. If Sleepy Hollow can keep up this tone, but slow down the pace just a bit, and take it’s time with all 30 of these things, instead of introducing 30 more things, we might just be witnessing the third greatest show of all time (on FOX debuting in 2013).

– Ryan Haley