Sleepy Hollow: "For the Triumph of Evil" Review

I figured the third episode wasn't too far into a new show to join. So I caught last Friday's rerun of the new show Sleepy Hollow. Though it doesn't seem to have any well-known stars at the helm, Sleepy Hollow can be found on several lists of "new shows to be sure and watch this fall" (like this one and this one.) I'm glad I did watch it, because from what I can tell, this show has a few things going for it:

It has a relatively original premise (for a procedural.) From what I gathered so far, Ichabod Crane has been resurrected in modern-day upstate New York, where he now helps a young police lieutenant, Abbie Mills, solve supernatural crimes. The episode I watched centered around "The Sandman," a mysterious midnight menace who begins killing people from the lieutenant's troubled past. So while there are the standard cop-plus-knowledgable-sidekick and cop-with-a-dark-secret tropes, Sleepy Hollow has the distinction of being a sci-fi, quasi-historical, time-traveling procedural. The overarching villain is, of course, the headless horseman. But Sleepy Hollow's headless horseman also happens to be one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. (Right? Weird. But kind of intriguing.)

Source: facebook.com/SleepyHollow

It has a nice combination of horror and humor. For a ghost (or a zombie or whatever), Ichabod Crane sure has a sense of humor. This was particularly surprising to me because, having never read Washington Irving's classic, all I knew about Crane was gathered from Disney's animated mini-movie, in which the title character was kind of a loser and a coward. Not so with Tom Mison's Ichabod, who is  delightful and delightfully handsome. His banter with Nicole Beharie's Lt. Mills balanced out the freakiness of the nightmarish plot.

It seems like you could miss an episode and not be totally lost. After all, this may be the procedural's greatest strength. It makes for a good occasional viewing.

The thing that might keep me away from Sleepy Hollow isn't the horror of it (I'm a fan of The X-Files) or the standard crime drama (I'm also a fan of NCIS.) What will keep me away is the fact that Sleepy Hollow is on FOX, a network my rabbit ears aren't often tuned to. But if Sleepy Hollow stays as interesting as I think it will, I just might make the effort. Especially since the show has already been picked up for a second season. Sleepy Hollow airs Mondays at 9 on FOX.