A picture worth a thousand shady words…
Tom Mison and Ken Olin discuss the last scene between Abbie and Ichabod.
deja vu.
Blah blah blah.
^I know… So many empty words now
I adore Tom Mison/Ichabod Crane, but they are not the center of the series. It is not "original" to have a white man the center of attention. This has been done over and over and over again. Constantly. It's the same with white women. Television caters to them and rarely to people of color. The center of the series was Abbie Mills/Nicole Beharie. She was the audience. She was us. Someone said Abbie connected all the characters, and she did. These characters didn't have anything in common, except for Abbie. For this show to be solely focused on Crane as if Abbie Mills/Nicole Beharie did not exist is really upsetting and erases her role/character in the entire series. As a black woman, I don't see myself anymore in it. Abbie is not the help for Crane, for her white male partner. I am not the help. Abbie has her own identity outside of Crane. Yes, Tom is a great actor, but what other roles has he been in before Sleepy Hollow started? The show is not all about Ichabod Crane/Tom Mison. It was never just about him.
Nicole Beharie
Orlando Jones is bae ❤️❤️❤️❤️ I need this shirt
oh captain my captain
Love him 😢😢
Perfect summation of the betrayal @sleepyhollowfox orchestrated in season 3.
“Then, in their last moments together, she tells Crane merely to “bash some monsters for [her] and look out for Jenny,” offering him a fist bump; when he takes her closed hand and kisses it, she makes a joke of it, chuckling, “Be still my heart.” For his part, as the woman he’s claimed is his destiny says her final words, Crane offers quite calmly, “I will miss you” and gives her a polite bow.
Neither cry. They do not hug. Not an “I love you” is exchanged. The build-up, the overt foreshadowing, the blatant statements—they go nowhere. The tortured somersault of the last three years just ends. It is an epic let-down; a dissatisfying, anti-climactic slap in the face to Abbie, Crane, and all of us who have loved them.” Read more at A Devastating SLEEPY HOLLOW Finale For Fans, and its Lead Character | ScreenSpy
Motherfuckers. I’ll NEVER get over that. They COULDN’T. EVEN. LET. US. HAVE. THAT.
Aside from all the curse words , I completely agree. I’m sitting there in my bed ( fell asleep by accident during a commercial) anyways , I wake up and next thing I know her and crane speaking , not saying the three words I’ve been wanting them to so bad , and then she dies …thought it was fake until they had a memorial service 😒😒😩😩😩 sigh…well there goes my Friday nights
@lajoymechell They didn’t have a memorial service for Abbie. That was just Pandora terrorizing a random black church (full of all the never before seen black people of sleepy hollow). No one mourned Abbie Mills, not even her father and sister.
How Abbie Mills Changed the World
In my mind, there are two eras of fandom: Before Abbie, and After Abbie.
I believe that fandom is a microcosm of the larger society. It may feel like Abbie was a big waste of time because of how and why she ended, and that her fans really didn’t have a voice, but she changed things.
The implosion of Sleepy Hollow
Fans are desperate to see a wider variety of experience represented in mainstream culture, so they create their own stories using the common cultural language mainstream media has provided. This lack of diversity is one of the reasons Sleepy Hollow, when it first premiered, was met with such enthusiasm. It was a diamond in the rough: a genre TV show featuring multiple characters of color.
Sure, the supernatural drama’s following came in part because it was a lot of ridiculous fun, with its shotgun-wielding Headless Horsemen and its time travel twist on the typical police procedural, but it was also one of the few shows on network TV that had a black female lead in the form of Nicole Beharie’s Abbie Mills. The word spread on Tumblr and Twitter and in meta analysis across the Internet.
While Ichabod Crane may have been the character who (very loosely) carried over from canon, it was Abbie who was allowed to be the audience surrogate character — an all-important narrative element that doesn’t usually come in the form of a black woman, let alone one who transcends black female stereotypes to get an actual character. (For specific examples of how much Abbie Mills’ character struck a chord with viewers, especially women of color who are so underrepresented in pop culture, check out the #IAmAbbieMills and the #AbbieMillsDeservesBetter hashtags on Twitter…)
Last week, Sleepy Hollow made waves for all of the wrong reasons when it killed off Abbie Mills. This was the final nail in the coffin for this show, which has been steadily relegating its characters of color into the background since that first, glorious season 1. John Cho and Nicholas Gonzalez left. The storylines for both Abbie and her sister, supporting character Jenny Mills (Lyndie Greenwood), faded in prominence as the story of Ichabod Crane and his dysfunctional family took center stage. After criticizing the show on social media for downsizing his role, fandom-friendly actor Orlando Jones was asked to leave the show after season 2.
Sleepy Hollow had a sad, slow demise from one of the most-talked-about, diverse shows on TV, with an enthusiastic fandom to boot, to a shadow of its former self with a shadow of its former audience. It was a classic example of TPTB either not understanding why people were watching their show or, if they did, doing nothing to play to it. People responded to the diverse nature of this well-rendered cast of characters, the subversion of the white alpha male archetype with sentimental, fish-out-of-water Crane, and the chemistry between its two talented leads. Season 3 especially all but eliminated most of these elements.
There are many factors that go into the construction of a TV narrative. Many of them have nothing to do with what TPTB think would make a good story. Sometimes, budget constraints or actors schedules force scriptwriters to make narrative decisions they would otherwise never make. Nicole Beharie chose to leave Sleepy Hollow, but that was after the narrative sidelining of her once prominent character, which she presumably didn’t choose. She also didn’t choose the insulting, culturally tone-dead manner in which her character was written out.
The handling of Abbie’s exit as a character on this show is not the only narrative misstep Sleepy Hollow has made (though it is the biggest). It is the latest in a long line of missteps demonstrative of a larger ignorance of what made people respond so enthusiastically to Sleepy Hollow in the first place, and one made even worse by the way fan interaction was handled in the months leading up to Beharie’s exit.
When season 3 started, the Sleepy Hollow TPTB proclaimed they had listened to fan feedback in regards to Abbie’s sidelining in season 2. They also teased a potential romantic resolution for Ichabod and Abbie throughout season 3, though never delivered on it. Just the latest example of TPTB playing with fandom fire and getting burned. Though, I will admit, not the most egregious example to be found on network TV in the past few months…
Honestly, I’d love to see Nicole and Tom be co-stars in something again. I loved their chemistry together and will deeply miss it.
Check out this article about #IAmAbbieMills. So honored to be featured in this. Please continue to use the tag and let our voices be heard.
Do more than that. Honor our bond. And be brave. Be strong. I know you will be.
To the Fandoms Helping Out:
We want to keep this event Abbie Mills specific. We are joining together to combat systemic discrimination in the media. However due to Abbie Mills’ unique place in television we want to make sure to keep this event focused on Abbie herself.
Please remember when speaking of the discrimination that Abbie faces, speak directly to her blackness, while Abbie is woman of color she faced discrimination specific to that blackness. In 3 seasons of television:
- Abbie Mills was not kissed and had no onscreen romance
- Abbie sacrificed herself thrice for the world, her partner Ichabod never did
- she was repeatedly sidelined and displaced while white women were pushed into her place (said women were then horribly written besides)
- Sleepy Hollow itself was originally promoted as diverse show making their treatment of the black actors and characters on this show that much more egregious
- the “don’t need no man trope” which is specific to black women was applied to her by the writers room: “Abbie loved Ichabod, but Ichabod was in love with Abbie.”
- Abbie also faced colorism from her own fandom as some viewers repeatedly called for her to be replaced by her light-skinned, acceptably curly haired sister
- originally Abbie was supposed to die mid-season, that’s right as far as the writer’s of Sleepy Hollow were concerned this co-lead, only black woman leading a genre show, arguably fan favorite’s death didn’t even warrant a season finale
- her final words to her partner were that “her purpose was to carry him forward and she had nothing more to do”, in an interview with one of the writers they said: “she had served her purpose”
- she existed solely for the benefit of a man
- while she started strong Abbie was diminished in every way as her S1 love interests were written out apropos of nothing to make room for story line’s that centered the conflict around her white male partner (now I like Ichabod, but their storylines needed to be equally important)
- all POC supporting cast were either killed off or slowly disappeared from the show: John Cho, Orlando Jones, Jill-Marie Jones, Amandla Stenberg,Nicholas Gonzalez.
- Nicole Beharie herself was not invited to the season 2 DVD commentary, she recently had to ask the Sleepy Hollow fox twitter account to follow her, she was told that no one wanted to see her at conventions without Tom Mison
Essentially they hired an amazing Julliard trained actress and diminished her and the character she played in every conceivable way. The simple human wastage is disgusting, the constant slights are an outrage, and the blend of racism and sexism she endured us beyond the pale. And all of it is specific to her blackness so remember that when we work this trending event.
She is not simply a WOC, but a black woman. The strong woman who doesn’t need a man trope is specific to her blackness, being a pack mule whose feelings are not considered is specific to her blackness, being considered disposable is specific to her blackness and being only considered for her usefulness to her white co-workers is specific to her blackness.
#SleepyHollow, s03e06
This tweet perfectly captures what I feel about Sleepy Hollow killing off Abbie.
She was a main and they treated her like crap, putting the white male lead’s story first every time.
Nicole Behari even had to ask the show’s official twitter to follow her.
She was unhappy with how they treated her and her character, so I’m glad she got out, but Abbie Mills was a god damn treasure and now she’s gone.