Paley Festival: 'Sleepy Hollow' the Focus Tonight

The first-season Fox mystery-adventure drama "Sleepy Hollow" will be spotlighted tonight at the 31st annual PaleyFest at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood.

Series stars Tom Mison and Nicole Beharie and creators Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci and Len Wiseman will be among the participants in a panel discussion.

The session begins at 7 p.m. and a live stream of the panel discussion will begin at 7:30 p.m.

"This show has proven to be a risk well worth taking," Fox Broadcast Co. Chairman of Entertainment Kevin Reilly said Oct. 1 in announcing the renewal of "Sleepy Hollow" for a second season.

"It's a conceptual blast unlike anything else on television and it all holds together with inventive writing and a fantastic cast."

The series in which a resurrected Ichabod Crane (Mison) pairs up with a present-day police lieutenant (Beharie) to save the enigmatic town of Sleepy Hollow and the world from unprecedented evil stems from a suggestion by Phil Iscove, who was then an assistant at the UTA talent agency, according to Orci.

Iscove "had this idea of doing a modern-day 'Sleepy Hollow"' and would bring it to the present by fusing "it with a lot of the ideas in 'Rip Van Winkle,"' another of Irving's stories, said Orci.

"We said, 'Where do we sign up?"' Orci said. "From that point, we started developing it. When we pitched it to Fox, they jumped on it right away."

Sessions at the event billed by organizers as the ultimate television fan festival consist of screenings of episodes or highlights of the featured work, followed by questions from the audience to the series' casts and creative teams.

Information on tickets, the live streams and festival app are available at the website of the Paley Center for Media, Paleycenter.org.

PaleyFest will continue through March 28.

--City News Service