By ANDY GILCHRIST
Staff Writer
As a piece in last week’s issue of The Chronicle highlighted, Hollywood seems to have run out of ideas. For every original film or television series that is produced, there are a dozen adaptations, sequels, prequels, or remakes being churned out. While many groan over this lack of creativity, it can occasionally give us something great.
Films like the Lord of the Rings and Dark Knight trilogies and television series like Hannibal and Justified are all adaptations. Last week, the Fox network debuted their newest series, Sleepy Hollow, and it is the latest adaptation to hit screens. Will it give fans another reason to roll their eyes at Hollywood or is this a show that actually deserves your attention?
The show opens in local Hudson, New York during the American Revolution. Ichabod Crane (Tom Mison), an American soldier, duels a masked redcoat swinging an axe and beheads him, but is struck down in the process.
Flash forward to the present day and Crane suddenly awakens in a cave. He walks out of the cave and into a patch of fog, where he is almost run down by a truck; he is literally attacked by the future. Barely surviving his first encounter with the new millennium, Crane stumbles into the small town of Sleepy Hollow.
Across town, Lieutenant Abbie Mills (Nicole Beharie) is preparing to leave town for a spot at the FBI training academy in Quantico, Virginia. On her final patrol, an also-resurrected Headless Horseman beheads the town’s sheriff and rides off into the night. Reporting only that a man dressed in very old clothing is responsible, a dazed and confused Crane is promptly arrested.
While police captain Frank Irving (Orlando Jones) wants Crane locked away, convinced he is insane, Abbie realizes that Crane is the only chance she has of solving the sheriff’s murder. While the two investigate, they discover that Crane’s wife was a witch and is currently trapped in Hell, that the sheriff had compiled a dossier of strange activity within the town during his tenure that filled an entire filing cabinet, and that the Headless Horseman is actually Death, the first Horseman of the Apocalypse. It seems the resurrections of both Crane and the Horseman have signaled the restart of an ancient war between the forces of good and evil and only Crane and Abbie stand in the way of the end of the world.
There have been numerous adaptations of Washington Irving’s short story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” since it was published in 1820. Perhaps the best known versions are the 1949 Disney cartoon, narrated by Bing Crosby, and Tim Burton’s 1999 film Sleepy Hollow, starring Johnny Depp as Crane.
What makes this version so unique is that it’s barely an adaptation at all. In the original story, Crane is a meek schoolteacher who is run out of town by the horseman, being much too afraid to face him. In the TV series, Crane is a brave soldier who is facing off against the horseman under secret orders from George Washington. Quite frankly, if the setting and main character’s name were different, it would be the exact same show. This series is so different from the story it’s adapting, it’s actually confusing that the producers chose to lift so few elements from the story. Perhaps they were hoping name recognition would attract more viewers?
The show comes to us from Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, writers/producers of the Transformers and Star Trek movies and the past Fox TV show Fringe, and Len Wiseman, director of such blockbusters as Underworld, Live Free or Die Hard, and 2012’s Total Recall (another remake!). With such an action-heavy background, it’s no surprise that the psychological terror of the short story has been pushed away by over-the-top action. The first episode opens with a huge battle, with Crane and the pre-Headless Horseman fighting in the center of it all. The pilot ends with a gunfight between Abbie, Crane, and the Horseman, which allows the producers to show the Horseman annihilating people with an AK-47. If future episodes focus more on the action than the story, this show could be in trouble.
And yet, the show is very entertaining. All of the actors bring their A-game, especially Tom Mison as Crane, believably portraying a man in an extreme fish-out-water/man-out-of-time situation.
Though the series has the usual “why is there a Starbucks on every corner?” line, it also deals with Crane and Abbie’s differences intelligently. In one of their first conversations, Crane asks if Abbie, a black woman, has been emancipated, since he comes from a time when slavery was the norm. By erasing the original characterization of Crane, the series allows him to be a strong, heroic leading man, equally capable to keeping up with his police officer partner, whereas a nervous schoolteacher could not.
Time jumps, witches and demons, files filled with paranormal activity, the end of the world. Sleepy Hollow throws a lot at the wall in its debut, hoping all of the pieces will somehow come together by the end of its freshman season. Though many shows would falter under the introduction of so many elements and hints of a deep mythology, this series seems to have the talent and determination to pull it off and become a complex and entertaining show that lasts for years.
