Review: "Sleepy Hollow" - Season 1

WISEMAN, Len, et.al., (Dirs.), “Sleepy Hollow”, Sketch Films, K/O Paper Products, Twentieth Century Fox, 2013.

I’ve been sequestered at my DVD player recently, watching various Things of Interest. One of them was the first season of “Sleepy Hollow” of which I have to say some good and bad things.

First: this is a hoot. Turn your brain off and give it a go – you will LYAO. Also, it’s actually quite scary, so you will be flip-flopping between laughs and frights. The scares are mainly of the physical conflict type but, since these are the sort of things that make me flinch in a scary film, I was all for it.

However. DON’T - I repeat, DON’T – let your brain engage with the narrative, at any point. It will just make you angry.

A lot of television nowadays takes short-cuts in relaying information, and it’s to the detriment of the televisual experience. There’s a sense here that, if you’ve watched the “X-Files” and you’ve seen “Supernatural”, you know the drill, so we don’t have to spell things out for you. This is Not Good. There are moments with this show where the writers depend upon this assumed knowledge and it turns into a high-wire act. If you watch with a critical eye, you’ll be seeing chunks of action where some audiences will be left swinging in the wind. Sucks to be them.

Also, along with this, there’s a tendency to “quick-fix” gaps in the characters’ knowledge. According to this show, an education at Oxford in the 1700s gave you access to Egyptian Hieroglyphics, Ogham text, and grimoires that weren’t even written while you were sharpening your sword and filling your beer stein to face your first examination. And –apparently -merely applying to study at Quantico makes you a de facto FBI agent. Also, being in charge of the local police outfit means that the rules don’t apply in any circumstance, and being a witch means that you’re automatically the sexy kidnap bait of all the bad guys in the vicinity. Ho. Hum.

Some props and other McGuffins are photocopied pages of the “cool pictures” from Barrett’s The Magus and are ascribed to wildly inappropriate sources. History has all the malleability of plasticine and gets infinitely re-written depending upon the needs of the current episode. Who knew that the American War of Independence was such a multi-layered hotbed of occult mayhem? Maybe Chaosium should go ahead and print that splat-book of Cthulhu weirdness in the Colony after all. In short, it’s sheer nonsense and will seriously annoy historical or supernatural purists. (Like me!)

The premise is this: Ichabod Crane gets resurrected in the Twenty-First Century when someone summons Death, one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, in order to kickstart the End Of Days (for some inexplicable reason). It transpires that Death has incarnated as the Hessian mercenary (but not really) that tried to kill Ichabod during a 1700s imbroglio, despite that worthy chopping his head off (thus becoming the Headless Horseman of the Washington Irving story). Their blood mingled, their destinies became entwined; where one went, the other followed. So Ichabod Crane wakes up in the 2010s and has to adjust to living in a whacked-out world.

This is where the series gets its strength. Ichabod doesn’t just assume a foetal position and whimper in the face of modernity; he gets outraged by it and demands to know how it is that things have turned out so badly. These moments are where the writers devote the major portion of their creativity and they are instances of television gold. Not since the “Addams Family” has there been such gorgeous anachronistic worldview collisions. Watching Ichabod negotiate baked goods, car doors and skinny jeans is worth the price of admission alone.

As Ichabod’s foil, the police officer Abbie Mills is an appropriate entity. Being female and black, she’s the walking symbol of Ichabod’s nascent emancipationist ideals. And while some mileage is given to this premise, it gets shooed out the door before it really makes its mark. Abbie becomes Ichabod’s straight woman way too early, before we really get to see how much territory Ichabod has to cross in order to catch up. In fact it’s Abbie’s sister Jenny who is more confrontational and interesting – a tooled-up, ex-psychiatric patient, with an informal masters degree in occult lore, she has “Mrs Dean Winchester” pasted all over her.

Speaking of the Winchesters, One of the things I hate about “Supernatural” is the constant whingeing between Sam and Dean that pads out great swathes of the episodes: you thought I was this; I thought you were that; family before personal expression; hunting before private life. Guys! Get a room! Enough! Get out there and bitch-slap that Monster of the Week! Sadly, there’s a heap of this crap in “Sleepy Hollow”, between Ichabod and Abbie and between Abbie and Jenny. All I can say is have the remote nearby so you can fast-forward through the family dramatics.

What else? Have you watched “Person of Interest”? Did it ever seem strange to you that everyone that needed saving in that show was always conveniently situated within the New York City area? Given the quality of writing on that show, it only ever niggles in the back of your mind. In “Sleepy Hollow” everything is intensely concentrated in this minute village of no earthly consequence. It bends believability. That’s all I have to say.

It’s actually a little sad that the Yanks have to barbarise their history in order to make it in any way interesting to their own people but, that being said, it’s interesting to see them mangling it for entertainment purposes rather than passing off extravagantly warped versions of it as reality for once. “Sleepy Hollow” is like the methadone that they should give to Snoop Dogg to wean him off “Game of Thrones”.

This is a show where the rationale is to occupy the day–to-day lifestyles of a number of moderately attractive thespians. I would like Tom Mison to stop mincing and hand-flapping, but otherwise it somehow works. The action sequences are brutal; the “fish out of water” comedy is pure gold; the narrative is pure crap.

Turn your brain off and have a good time!

Two-and-a-half Tentacled Horrors.