If we know anything about Fox it’s that they like to do horrible things to good shows. Now the network feels that ‘Sleepy Hollow‘ needs some changes. While it could be a cause for concern, the drastically reduced ratings show that a change might just be what’s needed to keep the show on the air. With the first season having an average of 8.6 million viewers, the current viewership of the second season being in the low 5 million range shows a definite loss of eyes on screen.

At the recent TCA press tour, Fox TV chairman and CEO Dana Walden had quite a bit to say about the show:

“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.”

‘Sleepy Hollow’ is a unique series though this latest season has felt a little dry so far which has been one of the main complaints as of late:

“We are responding to a little bit to — not necessarily the criticisms — but this show has a high level of difficulty. It’s a relationship show, a period show, you have iconic characters, you’re trying to tell mysteries and the show got a little overly serialized this past season. It’s very difficult on a show like this to get the exact right balance. Honestly, we felt watching the show, as passionate viewers, the show got too serialized. As part of our diagnostic process on any show, we tried to determine what’s working and what’s not working. We’re trying to return the fun to it a little bit. It’s an epic battle between good and evil, so there’s a tendency to be a little dark. It’s all about calibrating the show, not about making dramatic changes.”

Well, if the show is not planning on getting darker, we shouldn’t be afraid of losing any of the lead characters in the near future as Walden assures fans:

“We don’t have any creative changes [planned]. It was more [about] having a show that’s easier to access week to week that you don’t have to feel like if you tune into episode three of our new run, that you have to go back and watch the first two. So some greater procedural stories and maybe toning down a little bit the apocalyptic vision that existed in the initial episodes this season.”

Of course with the apocalypse looming, how much room is there in the lives of our heroes for putting a more serialized content back on the table? How can you focus on individual cases when the end of the world is at hand? Without a creative way to put that on hold we could see a different set of complaints crop up.

As to if we’ll be seeing another season of the show after this current one? That decision is still up in the air and fans will have to wait a little longer on an answer, however Walden is “hopeful it will come back as well.”

What do you think about changes being made to ‘Sleepy Hollow’?

Source: Entertainment Weekly