What Happened To Its Beautiful Brain?!

I'm still struggling with this new television show called Sleepy Hollow. I don't understand what it is. I watched the pilot episode, and it's just all over the fucking place. I wondered why FOX would green light a series based on a very short and simple story published in the year 1820, created by the power trio of Roberto Orci & Alex Kurtzman (those brilliant minds behind the new Star Trek movies) and Len Wiseman (the visionary director of the Total Recall remake). What kind of adaptation should we expect for an ongoing series and what similarities would it share with the story?

The final product has almost nothing to do with the classic Washington Irving story, transforming Ichabod Crane into a British soldier who switched sides during the Revolutionary War, choosing to fight for colonial freedom after falling in love with a witch(?), fated to murder a redcoat on the battlefield who bears the mark of a longbow on his hand, because some ageless priest told him this was the case, apparently. Mortally wounded, Crane manages to very easily decapitate the redcoat, who wears what appears to be a leather facemask for no immediately discernible reason. Slipping into unconsciousness, he awakens in a cave, stumbling out into the small town of Sleepy Hollow in the year 2013.

Sheriff Clancy Brown and his sassy deputy are looking for something somewhere, and the headless redcoat chops off Clancy's head, which maybe was a little wink and a nudge to those fans of the Highlander franchise? Meanwhile, Ichabod is immediately arrested by Sheriff's deputy John Cho (?) for apparently matching the description of a giant headless dude in an old red coat brandishing a battle axe, even though aside from the genital similarity, there are really no other physical traits shared by both characters.

It's clever because the dude's missing head is where the "O" should be.

The headless redcoat picks up some automatic weapons and shoots some people, Ichabod and the lady deputy bond over some shit, she tells him she saw a hulking demon in the woods when she was a kid but convinced herself that it wasn't real, then Ichabod speaks with his witch wife in a vision, and she tells him that he has to find the redcoat's head and prevent the apocalypse with the deputy, because they are the two "witnesses" depicted in the witch's personalized (by Jesus) copy of the fucking Bible, which, in its version of the Book of Revelation (which contains the letter "s" at the end of the word "Revelation", because nobody does their research), identifies the decapitated redcoat with the brand on his hand as DEATH, one of the Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse. If he is reunited with his head, the other horsemen will rise and the end-times will commence.

He learns that The Two Witnesses have been tasked with the mission to lead humanity through a seven-year period of tribulation that will decide the ultimate fate of the world. Why seven years? Because the creators of this series are insanely optimistic. Ichabod also learns that he was resurrected in the modern age because his blood mingled with the blood of the redcoat, and now they are bound in this mortal realm. So when the redcoat rose from his grave, so did Mr. Crane. I guess maybe John Cho resurrected the redcoat, because he was secretly in league with the forces of darkness? I don't know.

At the end of the pilot, John Cho gets his neck snapped by some horned monster that lives in a mirror because the series couldn't afford to keep him in the cast, and the two remaining characters discover that the late Sheriff Kurgan was actually some kind of witch hunter or occult expert of some stripe who conveniently gathered a shitload of apocalypse-related ephemera before his untimely death, which will surely come in handy for our heroes. As the final moments play out, a scratchy voice-over by Clancy Brown pathetically tries (and fails) to capture the power and gravitas of the ending narration to Johnny Cash's song "When The Man Comes Around". Hearing this, I told my television to go fuck itself.

There's so much going on in this episode, but it's all so terribly realized. The acting, for the most part, is never convincing, but I can't really blame the cast for this. I can't imagine how this fucking script must read. The series bible must be a Frankenstein's monster of disparate references all stitched together in a barely-coherent fashion. I know how this project got started. Orci and Kurtzman must have been sitting around in their swank office, trying to come up with a new idea for a television series since Fringe was wrapping up. One of them brought up the iconic image of the Headless Horseman from that "Sleepy Hollow" story, but they realized that there's really no way to adapt that story into an actual series. Stalemate.

But these brilliant bastards couldn't let it go. There was something there, dammit! The Headless Horseman... horse-man... horse... Eureka! Aren't there, like, four of those horsemen in the Holy Bible? Isn't that a thing? Yeah, yeah, in the Book Of Revelations, right? The Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse! What if... the Headless Horseman... is actually... one of the Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse?! Everything else came after.

These two meatheads thought their little idea was so fucking clever, they couldn't wait to pitch this to some brainless executive over at FOX. It's all so incredibly fucking stupid, I can't believe it actually made it to the airwaves. How does this thing exist? How long can it last? The first episode got huge ratings, but will those ratings last? Are there people out there who genuinely enjoyed this landfill of a television show? And if so, how? What kind of undiagnosed mental disorder must these people have that allows them to be entertained by something so loathsome as Sleepy Hollow?

More creative than anything in the Sleepy Hollow pilot.

Speaking of landfill, I've got some noise pollution for ya! That's right, I'm late again. But only by two days. That's not so bad, right? Eh... I've got two episodes for you dickbags this time. They're not clip shows, so don't get nervous. These two installments of Lies My Podcast Told Me are both culled from the same bourbon-fueled conversation, and they're really fucking terrible, let me tell you.

I can't believe I actually put them on the world wide web, they're so bad. In fact, you shouldn't listen to them. Nobody should ever listen to them. I hate the fact that I listened to them while I was editing them. I think they gave me brain damage. So don't listen to these pieces of shit. Don't do it. I don't care. But they're below, anyway, because I don't have anything else to do.

Episode 38 is entitled Angry Nerds In A Steel Cage Grudge Match. In it we discuss various topics, such as professional wrestling, Doctor Who, public television, and sexism in pop culture. It's fucking worthless. Episode 39 is entitled Songs Of Freedom & Jesus and is mostly about our confusion regarding something called "The Gaither Family Reunion". There's some brief discussion of the latest Queens Of The Stone Age album, as well as a dash of blasphemy. It's less than nothing. Fuck it:

Chapter 38: Angry Nerds In A Steel Cage Grudge Match



Chapter 39: Songs Of Freedom & Jesus



I'm done.

BLAH BLAH BLEEEEEH...

Barbara Crampton: A Real Class Act!