Heads will roll

MANILA, Philippines -Sleepy Hollow is the latest entry in the fantasy-come-to-life genre. But what distinguishes the Fox show from similar series such as Grimm or Once Upon A Time is its audacity in taking a classic bone-chilling tale and having some fun with it.

Using “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” as a mere jumping-off point, Sleepy Hollow foregoes the period setting of the 1819 Washington Irving original and recasts it in the present. The ill-fortuned schoolmaster Ichabod Crane is now a soldier who dies in 1781 while battling Redcoats during the Revolutionary War.

He wakes up in modern-day Sleepy Hollow, accompanied by a foe he thought he had vanquished with a simple beheading. As this headless horseman stalks the residents of the small town, trying to obtain a talisman, Crane teams up with a police detective to catch the spectre and unravel the mystery.

Combining time travel, crime and the supernatural may sound horribly preposterous, but it works in this case. The fast-paced Sleepy Hollow finds its anchor in its appealing cast. The British actor Tom Mison, who previously appeared in the Anne Hathaway-Jim Sturgess feature One Day, plays Crane with a sly wink. Shame’s Nicole Beharie is the tart sheriff, the Scully to Ichabod’s Mulder. Rounding out the plucky troupe are Orlando Jones as Capt. Frank Irving and Katia Winter as Katrina Crane, the witch-wife our protagonist wants to redeem from purgatory.

As the Sleepy Hollow pilot was Fox’s most successful fall drama premiere since 24 began in 2001, and the series was renewed for a second season after just three episodes, the gamble seems to have paid off for writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman and director Len Wiseman. In their capable hands, what could have been campy became clever. A lanky stranger running about in full period regalia and speaking in a clipped English accent is already ridiculous, but it would’ve been more so had no one noticed it and called it out.

“I think it’s important that there’s humor in a show like this,” Mison told i09.com at Comic Con. “If it was really earnest, I don’t think it would work. It’s nice that the characters are in completely real situations where they’re scared and they’re trying to work out what’s happening — but the show as a whole, the show gets the joke, even if the characters are completely serious.”

So it appears that shaping Sleepy Hollow to resemble the 1999 Tim Burton film was totally out of the question. “You’re dealing with a character without a head,” added Wiseman. “So you’re already in an environment where you can’t take yourself too seriously, and it’s already set the stage for that.”