Sleepy Hollow, FOX’s New TV Show Is Bonkers And We Love it

Last night, FOX debuted its new show
Sleepy Hollow,
to raves. According to the always infallible Wikipedia, the show can be classified as a "fantasy mystery thriller adventure drama." But that's only the start of its, shall we say, "complexity." The story centers on Ichabod Crane, skittish and ill-fated hero of Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and his supernatural terror-cum-shadow, The Headless Horseman. The resemblance to Irving's story, however, ends there. In the FOX version, Ichabod dies during a military mission in 1781, and is reborn in 2013 in Sleepy Hollow, New York, along with his headless foe. Now, Crane (Tom Mison) must team with a sexy young police officer (Nicole Beharie) to stop this horse-bound modern merciless murderer.

A few other things you missed last night:
-The Headless Horseman now has access to 21st-century weaponry, like exploding shotguns, and totally mythical weaponry, like searing-hot swords.
-There Will Be Blood. And decapitations. Lotsa them. Like at least three in the first episode alone.
-There Will Be Biblical Allegory. Because no longer is this Irving's ghost story colored by class struggle in post-colonial America or a battle between the rational mind and the id, but instead a pretty pablum reading of the Book of Revelation. (Headless Horseman = First Horseman of the Apocalypse. Get it?) Not that that makes for poor television. Bring on the seven-headed beast!
-All of those innocent "witches" who were murdered during the Salem-era hysteria and inspired Arthur Miller's immortal parable about Communism and the dangers of group-think? Turns out they were actually witches. Ichabod's wife was a witch, too — but a good witch, obvi.
-John Cho dies. Sorry for the spoiler, but you had to expect this was coming, right?

Perhaps FOX is trying to capture some of American Horror Story's rabid viewship — FX is owned by FOX, after all — but can it possibly maintain this insanity each week? (AHS had to resort to aliens, incest, and a fairly disgusting form of sex aversion therapy to kick it up a notch after its first season.) FOX tried this "historic charcter reanimated in modern-day New York with an entirely insane supernatural bent" thing in its short-lived 2008 drama,
New Amsterdam
, which ran for only eight episodes before it was canceled and starred a pre-Game of Thrones Nikolaj Coster-Waldau as a 400-year-old NYPD homicide detective. Why didn't that one take off? (EW.com)