On Saturday, Fox announced early renewals for a few of its shows, including newbies Empire and Gotham, but suspiciously absent from the list was last season's breakout hit, Sleepy Hollow. Fox Television Group co-chairman Dana Walden told reporters at the Television Critics Association winter press tour that the network will be making a few tweaks in the second half of Season 2 because the show has become a little "overly serialized," and that the goal is to "return the fun to it."

Entertainment Weekly has the full rundown on what Walden's comments, but here's the gist:



We’re excited about some creative changes on the show and bringing it back to something that feels a little more episodic in nature, that has closure and doesn’t feel quite so serialized. ... But we really love the show. We love Tom Mison and Nicole Beharie. They have fantastic chemistry. We feel like it’s a really unique series.

The keyword there is "unique." Fox is using the term, but it doesn't appear that the network fully understands what it means in relation to the show being discussed. There truly is nothing like Sleepy Hollow on TV; the series is a mash-up of several genres and frequently rewrites history in its use of real-life figures like George Washington and Ben Franklin as primary players in an epic war between good and evil. The show doesn't play by the same rulebook as everyone else, so why does it sound like Fox wants to make it more like every other procedural on television?

What the network doesn't seem to understand is that Sleepy Hollow's highly serialized nature is largely what resulted in its early success.. In Season 1, the series made effective use of its original 13-episode order to tell a tight, exciting story about destiny, loyalty, and courage in the face of great evil. The terror created by the villainous Headless Horseman and an overarching storyline about a demon named Moloch releasing hell on Earth—in combination with Sleepy Hollow's quick pace and charismatic central duo—are what initially enraptured the show's fervent audience. Before it debuted, the show's premise sounded pretty ridiculous on paper. But the series embraced its inner insanity, went balls-to-the-wall at every turn, and somehow, it just worked.

Sleepy Hollow's first season proved that it's still possible for a genre series to find a broad audience on network television. Since Lost ended, not many genre series have managed to pull in the numbers that Sleepy Hollow did in Season 1, when it averaged 7.48 million total viewers per episode. Unfortunately, that ratings success hasn't continued in Season 2; the series is currently averaging just 4.7 million viewers per week, and that's with a more balanced ratio of serialized stories to standalone/episodic ones.

One possible reason for the decrease in viewership is the fact, prior to Season 2, Fox increased the show's episode order from 13 to 18, which ultimately yielded more filler episodes. Like many fans, I feared that would be the case, and now, with 12 largely underwhelming hours under our belt, we now know our concerns were valid. Episodes involving pied pipers, wendigos, and weeping ladies took the show through unnecessary detours and slowed its momentum. Meanwhile, the writers tried (and failed) to build a worthwhile character arc for Katrina, a character many fans dislike for a multitude of reasons. Several of these episodes were eventually revealed to be tangentially related to an overarching storyline involving John Noble's Henry Parrish, but by that point, the damage had been done, and the phrase "less is more" had never felt more apt. In short, Sleepy Hollow has ALREADY cut back on its serialized elements, and it's gotten weaker as a result. Producing more standalone episodes is only going to make things worse.

I don't mean to suggest that supernatural shows with procedural elements can't be successful—Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Supernatural have both proven that it's possible to tell open-and-shut stories as part of a rich, mythology-driven, serialized drama. But in Season 2, Sleepy Hollow has struggled to achieve that balance while straining to fill out its extra episodes. And now it's being punished and forced to sacrifice its serialization in the name of monsters of the week because Fox is trying to fix something that wasn't broken until after it stepped in.

In Season 1, Sleepy Hollow's seemingly one-off outings were actually largely connected to its long-term plot. It skillfully incorporated both levity and the requisite life-and-death situations of its particular genre. And as the show progressed and its world expanded, the stakes grew higher and our heroes were tested. Without the continued universe-building that will come with additional serialization, I worry that Sleepy Hollow will no longer even resemble the show that fans fell in love with. Is Fox really going to keep alienating loyal viewers in an attempt to lure in different/new ones?

Lots of fans have blamed Sleepy Hollow's sophomore slump on the show's increased episode count, but now it appears that its demise is actually the result of Fox executives totally misunderstanding what makes it so special. The filler problem is part of that, of course, but this new development just reinforces the idea that the network's bigwigs don't know how to nurture genre programming or trust its fans. I have a sinking feeling that Sleepy Hollow is on track to suffer its own version of the Great Firefly Debacle of 2002 (or the Dollhouse Disaster of 2009), and that's incredibly unfortunate. What originally made the series so great was its fast-paced, complex narrative, and with less of a focus on an ongoing story, it will only continue to suffer.





What's your take on Sleepy Hollow's current plight?



