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  • How ‘Sleepy Hollow’ Shortchanged Its Black Actors—And Audience

    How ‘Sleepy Hollow’ Shortchanged Its Black Actors—And Audience

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    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.”  

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    Natalie Jarvey

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  • “It’s Very Easy to Monday-Morning Quarterback”: Kim Godwin Talks Scandals, Shake-Ups, and Success at ABC News

    “It’s Very Easy to Monday-Morning Quarterback”: Kim Godwin Talks Scandals, Shake-Ups, and Success at ABC News

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    By the numbers, ABC News is thriving. Network news president Kim Godwin has notched, or at least maintained, several wins since taking over in May 2021. ABC News is still the leading broadcast news network, with the number one show in the morning (Good Morning America) and at night (World News Tonight With David Muir). Ask people inside ABC News what’s going on, however, and few will start with the ratings, as the network has found itself in the headlines in recent months over a raft of controversies and crises. Most notably, an extramarital affair between T.J. Holmes and Amy Robach, the coanchors of GMA3, the third hour of GMA, played out in the tabloids. As the New York Post declared in a front-page headline: “Good Moaning America!” 

    Godwin, initially concluding that a relationship between two consenting adults wasn’t in violation of company policy, decided to keep the anchors on air even after the news of their affair broke in late November. At one point the hosts appeared to make a joke about the scandal; the following week, Godwin benched them, and by late January, they were out. More recently, New York published a story about the “Horned Up” office culture at ABC News and suggested that relationships at the network a decade back were tied to some people’s career advancements. Meanwhile, frustrations with Godwin, both related to the GMA3 scandal and her broader leadership, have been aired by Puck and the Daily Beast, complaints exacerbated by the perception among staffers that ABC News wasn’t pushing back aggressively against the bad press. Publicly, Godwin’s voice was nowhere to be found as the stories piled up—in fact, Godwin has rarely engaged with the media in her time at ABC News, giving only three interviews in nearly two years at the helm.  

    “It’s very easy to Monday-morning quarterback and second-guess when you don’t know what you don’t know, and frankly you’ll never know, because we’re not going to litigate it publicly,” Godwin recently told me of the Holmes-Robach situation over coffee at the Mandarin Oriental lounge, her first interview this year. “We ended up where we needed to be, and I’m very comfortable with that decision.” 

    Godwin was similarly reticent when asked whether she or her team should have pushed back harder against the New York story. Godwin emphasized that she “didn’t have any insight into” much of what was reported. “It’s hard for me to go back and try to figure out what happened before I got there. All I can do is focus on right here, right now, this is the culture,” and “there’s a zero-tolerance policy now,” she said.  

    Her response to me was similar to the one she’s given internally, which has left some employees unsatisfied. Multiple people I spoke to want to see Godwin more vigorously defending the organization as a whole, regardless of whether the issues in question happened on her watch. A recurring staff complaint about Godwin’s stewardship seems to center on communications—a perceived lack of transparency or clarity—on everything from potential layoffs to editorial vision. Sitting down with her in a booth overlooking Central Park, I tried to get a better sense of why.

    Godwin is the first Black woman to serve as a president of a major broadcast news division. Her historic appointment came at a tumultuous time for the network, amid a lawsuit accusing Michael Corn, the former top producer of GMA, of sexual harassment and fostering a hostile work environment. The suit also claimed ABC did not adequately address complaints of alleged misconduct from multiple women. (The lawsuit was later dismissed.) She got off to an awkward start, telling staffers she’d asked her superiors for an independent investigation into how ABC had handled the allegations—only for staff to learn a few weeks later that Godwin’s superiors at parent company Disney were reportedly caught off guard by her public request for an outside investigation, and would pursue no such probe.

    “Disney is huge, and coming in and not knowing anybody—it’s been a big learning curve, but I’ve been all in,” Godwin told me, who says she is “really stretching as an executive.” She noted the difficulty of coming in as the “first woman, the first person of color, the first outsider,” all in the midst of a pandemic. “Trailblazing is hard.” Plus, she says, her job requires presiding over “new businesses that previous presidents didn’t have to run,” such as streaming. “It’s not just the old way of, Let me just sit and watch World News Tonight. Like, there’s 15 other things that I have to get done.” 

    There’s also been a big corporate shake-up since she arrived, with former Disney CEO Bob Iger returning last November to replace Bob Chapek, his handpicked successor who was fired by the board. Even as Godwin says she’s kept focused on the work at ABC News, the shake-up could impact her position. The Daily Beast recently reported that Godwin, who currently reports to cochairman of Disney Entertainment Dana Walden, pushed back when her Disney superiors told her they wanted her to report to Debra OConnell, president of networks and TV business operations, who recently joined Walden’s senior leadership team. The move would put another layer between Godwin and the top brass. 

    Godwin had a brief laugh when I asked whether this structural matter had been resolved. “The bottom line is, I really don’t know, right? Our corporation is trying to figure it out, and trying to figure out who reports to who. What I do know is I’m still leading ABC News, and I have the support of both of my bosses,” she said. “As of this day, right now,” Godwin won’t be reporting to OConnell, she said, with the caveat, “There are a lot of moving parts, and I’m not privy to those conversations.”

    Godwin’s handling of the GMA3 scandal has raised questions about her future, but Iger, at a recent dinner with top ABC talent, including George Stephanopoulos, Robin Roberts, and Michael Strahan, affirmed his support, saying, “Kim’s success is our success, and we are invested in her,” a detail first reported by the Daily Beast. I asked Godwin whether she feels she has the right people around her to achieve that success. “It’s evolving,” said Godwin, touting the diversity of her executive team and showrunners. “Who knows how things may evolve, but we’re doing pretty darn well with the team that we have right now,” she said. “Change is hard, but I only ask for collaboration.” 

    But some insiders feel that Godwin is reluctant to lean on others and could be more communicative. “She’s making unforced errors because she doesn’t trust the people around her. A lot of us who want to see her succeed are just frustrated,” one longtime ABC News employee told me. Internally, people are still in the dark about the 7,000 jobs that Disney is set to eliminate, as Iger announced on last month’s earnings call. It’s unclear if ABC News will be hit hard—or left largely unscathed. Godwin says she told staff she shares their anxiety and “referred them to Bob’s note, which I thought was really well said.” But all she can do is tell people to “hold on” until decisions come down.

    While Godwin says she wants people to see her as someone they can trust, a reported leak investigation conducted by Disney global security has sent a different message. I’m told staffers were interviewed as part of a search for employees leaking information, which came after a Puck article about Godwin, who suggested she had nothing to do with the probe. “I didn’t call for it” or “approve it,” she told me, while emphasizing, “confidentiality is important in all organizations.” 

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    Charlotte Klein

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