The Headless Horseman in "Sleepy Hollow," more or less based on the Washington Irving tale
There's a certain thrill in seeing something familiar pop up in the middle of a prime-time network show.
Lately it’s been the Tappan Zee Bridge, the crumbling and frequently congested crossing about 25 miles north of midtown.
It spans the Hudson River at one of its widest points, linking South Nyack on the west bank and Tarrytown on the east. Since I grew up in the lower Hudson Valley, the bridge has always been part of life’s backdrop.
But lately it’s gone Hollywood, doing cameos in Fox’s new thriller “Sleepy Hollow.”
The show is loosely ( very loosely) based on “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” Washington Irving’s classic 1820 ghost story.
Like the short story, the hour-long drama is set on the eastern shore, in an area called Sleepy Hollow.
The Sleepy Hollow that turns into a Halloween-themed tourist destination this time of year is a far more modern invention.
Originally known as North Tarrytown, it was renamed in 1996 in a bid to capitalize on the heritage of Irving, who lived nearby.
A main attraction is the Old Dutch Church, which figures prominently in Irving’s tale as the horseman’s gravesite. The author himself is buried nearby, in a far larger cemetery — along with scores of other notable New Yorkers with names like Rockefeller, Carnegie and Astor.
In Irving’s story, schoolteacher Ichabod Crane vanishes while heading to the church for help. He’s being pursued by what he believes to be a bloodthirsty headless horseman — the spirit of a Hessian soldier whose head was shot off by a cannonball during the Revolution.
In Fox’s modern retelling, filmed in North Carolina, with those views of the Tappan Zee spliced in, Crane (Tom Mison) has been elevated to hunky former Oxford professor.
A turncoat who joins George Washington’s army and joins the general’s secret war against evil, occult forces, Ichabod dies shortly after he decapitates the Hessian.
He comes back to life in 2013 — as does the horseman, who quickly acquires semiautomatic weapons. The former academic then tries to stop the forces of hell from bringing about the apocalypse ... yada, yada, yada.
The show is sort of a cross between “The X-Files” and a buddy cop show (Crane teams up with a local police lieutenant, played by Nicole Behari). But between scenes . . . dizzying panoramas of the Tappan Zee swirl across the screen, making it seem as if we’re soaring over the bridge at rush hour.
These shots last only seconds.
Thank God I have an E-ZPass.
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