Sleepy Hollow Wants To Remind You Of Lots Of Other Shows You May Like

Here's what happens in the pilot of Sleepy Hollow, and let me assure you, while we like to have goof-around fun times on this site on occasion, all of this is true. Ichabod Crane is a soldier in General George Washington's army. In the middle of a battle, a redcoat in a creepy mask comes riding up to him with murderous intent. Ichabod cuts his head off and then passes out. When next we see him, he's digging his way out of a shallow grave in present-day Sleepy Hollow. But whoops, he's come to town at the same exact time as the now-headless horseman! And while the headless horseman is the one who totally killed Sheriff Corwin (Clancy Brown!), because Ichabod is running around in period dress talking all crazy -- and, in particular, making very rude comments to local cop Abbie Mills (Nicole Beharie), who is both a woman and black and therefore kind of confusing for our hero -- everyone assumes he did it.

Still with me? Okay. Crazy shit keeps happening: a local minister is decapitated, Ichabod discovers that he was buried with some special Bible, Abbie finds all kinds of files Corwin was keeping from his secret investigations into local unsolved occult-ish crimes. Then Ichabod gets a visit, in a dream, from his long-dead wife, who secretly belonged to a coven of good witches that were fighting the coven of bad witches in the area, and because the (eventually) headless horseman was not just a British soldier but an actual demon and his blood mixed with Ichabod's when they were both dying on the battlefield, the good witches had to do spells to try to centrifuge their essences apart or something. Long story short, Abbie and Ichabod have accepted each other's weird stories by the end of the episode, but not before digging up the headless horseman's head and finding out that one of her fellow cops (John Cho) is totally in league with the Horseman, or maybe the Horseman's boss, because then he totally gets his head cut off by some kind of other creature with a rather goatish appearance that we only see in extremely soft focus. Is the Horseman the ultimate evil or just one of its servants? Was Sleepy Hollow built on some kind of Buffy-esque Hellmouth? Will Abbie close this case and report for FBI training in Quantico after all? If the case is solved, will Ichabod get some kind of peace with his late secret-witch wife, or figure out how to hang in 2013?

Now that this summary's all written out, I see how silly it looks, and yet when the pilot got to the moment where we learned that the late Mrs. Crane was a member of the good-witch coven and that Ichabod and the Horseman are linked by blood, my immediate reaction was, "Well, that makes sense." It's a marker of the kind of pilot Stockholm Syndrome we go through every fall with sci-fi/fantasy/supernatural shows that any attempt at constructing an internal logic -- even one built completely on magic that is, by definition, made-up and impervious to the laws of existence as we know them -- was a relief. I was happy that Sleepy Hollow's producers had thought through their concept beyond "Time-Travelling Ichabod Crane," because I'm sure that -- plus the fact that Bad Robot mainstays Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci were attached -- is all it took to sell it, and that a pilot probably still would have made it to air with even less than what we saw.

That said, the more I sat quietly with my thoughts after the episode ended (admittedly, not long), the more I saw that it's been Frankensteined together from the parts of other successful TV shows and pop culture properties (though, ironically, not Frankenstein). Stories set at the intersection of by-the-book law enforcement and the machinations of some kind of half-man, half-horned forest creature was borrowed from Hannibal. The appearance of characters from classic horror literature was already pioneered by the British series Jekyll (and, yes, Do No Harm, but no one's going to sit here and say that was successful). Dispatching enemies via decapitation is a recurring motif of The Walking Dead. Witches getting up to coven business will be the theme of the forthcoming season of American Horror Story (subtitle: Coven).

Needless to say, the resulting supernatural procedural is definitely not greater than the sum of its purloined parts. Furthermore, the original Legend Of Sleepy Hollow has endured as a suspense story for a couple of centuries because it was pretty creepy to begin with. Why couldn't the producers have had the courage of their convictions and the trust of their (public domain) source material and figured out a way to draw mytharc storylines out of the original characters in their original historical period? In the end, that is what makes Sleepy Hollow kind of a bummer: the time travel aspect will never stop feeling goofy and forced, and no matter how legitimately scary they make the Horseman (and, to be honest, he is creepy), the illusion is kind of shattered when he's being chased around the present-day Hudson Valley by a cop car.

Fox's other big new procedural involves a future cop whose partner is a robot, which kind of makes this shit look like Deadwood -- only by comparison, though.