Actor Tom Mison star of the television show "Sleepy Hollow," poses for a portrait in New York, Jan.13, 2014. The show returns Monday at 9 p.m. to Fox and Global. THE CANADIAN PRESS/AP-Scott Gries/Invision/AP

As a brand-new television season begins, one of the few hits from last season is set to gallop back.

"Sleepy Hollow" — Fox's top-rated rookie and the No. 2 overall new U.S. drama last season (behind "The Blacklist") — returns Monday at 9 p.m. on Global and Fox. One of a growing number of American network shows producing shorter, cable-like seasons, the fantasy/drama ran 13 episodes and has been off the air since January.

This season, 18 episodes have been ordered, which is why 32-year-old star Tom Mison took several months off. "I went home and decided to use this time to prepare for the next 18 episodes," he said in July at the semi-annual TV critics press tour in Los Angeles.

At that point, Mison and his colleagues were already back at work at the show's home base in Wilmington, N.C. (home, also, to "Under the Dome"). "Last season we took a battering with it," says Mison, a native of London, who hopes the show won't still be going when he's in his 40s, "or I'll be exhausted. It's physically and emotionally draining."

And not at all the way TV shows work in England, where hits such as "Sherlock" or "Downton Abbey" only produce three to eight episodes a year. "Parade's End," the British series Mison appeared in with Benedict Cumberbatch, ran five episodes.

The actor was one of the fresh faces of 2013 as fish-out-of-water Ichabod Crane. The character is well known for tangling with the Headless Horseman in Washington Irving's 1820 short story "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." Toronto-born writer/producer Phillip Iscove, a Ryerson University grad, had the idea to spin the classic work of fiction into a "man out of time" fable, projecting Crane into a modern-day police story, complete with the soldier's 18th-century Revolutionary War wardrobe.

"I went into the ground with it. I'm sure I'll come out with it," says Mison about his war duds, although technically those were new. In Season 1, Crane came upon some re-enactors who outfitted him with new gear before he was again put into the ground.

The cliff-hanger found Crane buried alive inside a coffin, with time running out on getting him back above ground. Also starring are Nicole Beharie as Lt. Abbie Mills, an agent (and love interest) investigating the supernatural changes sweeping modern-day Sleepy Hollow, Orlando Jones as the local chief of police no longer skeptical of all the talk of the return of the Headless Horseman and Katia Winter as Crane's wife Katrina, a secret witch who cast the spell binding Crane to the Horseman. John Noble ("Fringe") plays a complicated character who pops out of his own coffin to haunt parents who appear younger than he is — Ichabod and Katrina.

If all this sounds as if people can jump back and forth in time, characters can pop in and out of history and anything goes, well, that would be correct.

"That's why I loved it when I first read the pilot," Milson told critics. "It's crazy and it's not like anything I had read before."

There was no fear this show could ever jump the shark, he added, "because in the pilot we kicked the shark in the teeth."

Milson himself has jumped into a strange new world in his leap across the pond from London to Wilmington. "I'm still refusing to say, 'Y'all," he says of his Carolina experience. He likes the slower pace of life and especially swimming at the beach, admitting "that's something I don't usually do at six in the morning in England."

When an American reporter suggests he was enjoying better food he quickly corrects that impression to be "more food. "I'm living off pulled pork and bourbon and sweet potato fries. That's my Americanization."

He feels the series does have a lot of "English humour" in it, especially in the dialogue. "It would be very easy for a show about people battling for the side of good against evil ... to become earnest," he says. "So it's nice to avoid that by having a grown man confused by a pen."

Look for Crane to get even more confounded as the series goes on. Mison says he talks regularly with executive producer Mark Goffman about where the series is heading. When he was told about the cliff-hanger the producers have in store for this season, Milson says, "my jaw hit the ground even harder than when he told me the finale last season."

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Bill Brioux is a freelance TV columnist based in Brampton, Ont.

News from © The Canadian Press, 2014