In 2013 Fox seemed to have a hit on its hands with the spooky crime procedural Sleepy Hollow. An admittedly bonkers premise, as well as simmering chemistry between Tom Mison and Nicole Beharie, helped the drama attract 10.1 million viewers for its premiere, and it was quickly renewed for a second season. The adaptation of the Washington Irving classic became particularly popular with Black viewers, who were drawn to a story that centered a Black female lead as well as several other characters of color. So it was all the more surprising when Beharie’s Abbie Mills was killed off at the end of season three. What happened? In her new book, Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood, Maureen Ryan argues that Sleepy Hollow failed to live up to the promise it made in its first season to its Black characters and Black viewers. “Sometimes patterns of ignorance morph into systematic contempt, and while intent does matter, intent is not magic,” she writes.
Last week, Vanity Fair excerpted a chapter of Ryan’s book about the poisonous culture on hit ABC drama Lost. (Ryan is a contributing editor at VF.) In another chapter, titled “Horror Story: Sleepy Hollow and the Myth of a Post-racial Industry,” she calls what transpired on the set of the drama series “evidence of some of the worst and most demoralizing things the industry can dish out.”
According to Ryan, who spoke to multiple sources from the show, both of Sleepy Hollow’s leads struggled at times with the responsibility of leading a high-stakes network drama. But she details multiple instances where Beharie was not given the same benefit of the doubt as her white male costar. (Beharie, through her representatives, declined to speak to Ryan for the book, and Mison’s reps did not respond to Ryan’s requests for comment. VF has reached out to reps for Beharie and Mison.) One source, whom Ryan calls Robert, told her, “When a bunch of white guys say a person of color is difficult, I tend to assume that there’s a lot more to that story.” The source added that he found Beharie “to be pleasant, extremely talented, and an actor who was adjusting to being a lead. There are growing pains with that. In the time I was there, where the discrepancy came in was how their growing pains were viewed and handled.”
In a 2020 interview with the Los Angeles Times, which Ryan quotes, Beharie said that when she and Mison—who played Ichabod Crane—both fell ill during filming of the first season, he was granted permission to travel back home to England to recover, while she was asked to shoot an episode on her own. “So I pushed through it and then by the end of that episode I was in urgent care,” she said. In that same LA Times interview, Beharie said she “was labeled as problematic and blacklisted by some people,” following her time on Sleepy Hollow. “I probably could have been more diplomatic about things in some way,” she said, but added, “I feel like it’s taken me the last few years to really see clearly that it wasn’t personal, it’s about the way that these structures are set up.”
Beharie faced other challenges, according to Ryan, like a wig that didn’t fit her properly, and she spent more time in hair and makeup than Mison during already-long days. In later seasons, Ryan learned, Beharie had her own hair and makeup team. But when Beharie debuted a new wig in season three with more natural curls, a group of white male writers and producers spent time debating whether it looked professional, according to writer Shernold Edwards, who described to Ryan several insensitive situations she herself experienced while working on Sleepy Hollow. (Clifton Campbell, who served as showrunner on Sleepy Hollow’s third season, told Ryan in a written comment that the conversation about Beharie’s wig was in response to “the studio/network’s decision that she could wear her hair more naturally so long as she maintained a ‘professional’ look.”) VF has reached out to reps for Campbell for comment.
Edwards told Ryan that her job working on the third season of Sleepy Hollow “quickly turned ‘hellish.’” When she went to set to produce an episode she had written, she recounted, Campbell “yelled at me for allowing a small dialogue change on Day 1 of shooting.” Campbell told Ryan that he did not recall the specific incident but that “it was a policy that I communicated to all writers on the show” that dialogue should not be changed without permission. Edwards said Campbell also cried in front of her on multiple occasions, including once after “he appeared to feel accused of racial bias in the way script assignments were handled,” Ryan writes. Campbell told Ryan he did not cry in front of Edwards but “anyone falsely accused of racism likely would be more emotional than average.”
The problems behind the scenes on Sleepy Hollow created problems in front of the camera too. Ryan writes that the creatives behind the show “did not seem to care about Abbie’s emotional life, her interiority, her dreams, her complexities.” Meanwhile, Mison’s Ichabod had multiple relationships during the run of the show. “If you think that has nothing to do with the fact that most of the people with power over the show—at the studio, at the network, and at the drama itself—were white, well, I just don’t agree,” she writes.
Abbie wasn’t the only Black character written off the show. Her boss—Frank Irving, who became a fan favorite during the first season—was killed halfway through the second season after veteran actor Orlando Jones balked at his season two offer. “A really shitty deal was offered to me with enthusiasm and joy,” he told Ryan. “So I accepted it with enthusiasm and joy, and I suggested I die.” After the fandom freaked out about his death, he was brought back for the second half of the season, but Jones told Ryan that the fumbling of his exit “was just one more piece of evidence that ‘they essentially didn’t value me, and I was disposable at best,’” so he declined to participate in the third season.
Ryan acknowledges that she may never know exactly what happened on Sleepy Hollow, but believes that systemic discrimination and bias fueled many of the conflicts. As she writes, “Whatever the attitudes or actions of any specific individual associated with Sleepy Hollow, given Hollywood’s hiring patterns, norms, gatekeepers, and history, it can indeed seem as though the industry was designed to produce these kinds of outcomes.”
Natalie Jarvey
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