How are your favorite PoC characters doing so far this season? Have they survived the midseason slaughter (as I am now calling it)?
Category: Sleepy Hollow
Minority actors land the lead roles in fall’s diverse TV lineup | New York Post
Check out the Post’s article on the PoC led dramas coming this fall. And a few are led by women! Numbers are getting better, but no where near where they need to be.
The link and a couple of quotes below.
With “Scandal” commanding $200,970 per 30-second advertising spot, it’s a cash cow.“The color Hollywood loves the most is green,” says Wilmore. “Shonda Rhimes really showed that you can have a black lead in your thriller and you can have a great show. She broke down that wall, and Hollywood follows success.”
Hollywood definitely follows the money. Hopefully these new shows prove to be great television as well. The problem we’ve faced in the past has not always been a lack of content (well, yes, this is the problem, but) sometimes the content put out there isn’t good. There are a lot of times people of color will watch a show featuring someone of their background and that will boost ratings, but ratings will drop off if they don’t consider the show good. It’s not just about representation in numbers, but representation in quality and content. Don’t just give us a show with a black person and say it’s diversity, the content has to be good as well.
Rina Mimoun, executive producer of “Red Band Society,” says that, because of the Rhimes effect, “people will open up their casting. There’s no reason not to.”
More and more producers are realizing this, but things still aren’t where they need to be. The Emmy’s certainly showed that with the small amount of PoC nominees and smaller winners (most weren’t even televised). Hopefully, with this new crop of PoC led shows, next year’s Emmy’s will feature more PoC nominees and winners (now that Breaking Bad is finally out of the race; and maybe Emmy voters will finally be over Modern Family).
(In addition to these current shows, let’s not forget Sleepy Hollow, also led by a black female–I don’t think the article mentioned it.)
via Minority actors land the lead roles in fall’s diverse TV lineup | New York Post.
Related articles
Fall TV 2014: How Packed is Your Primetime Schedule?
What are you watching this fall? What should I be watching? Can you squeeze in all this year's fall TV into your everyday life? Share your potential fall schedules!
Link: 2014 is the Year Black Women Take Over Hollywood | Clutch Magazine
“What I love about this list is that it is made up of black women who are content creators. It’s wonderful to have talented actresses in front of the camera, but what we desperately need is more black women behind the camera, shaping the portrayals we see on-screen. Often times we complain that black folks only get awards for playing slaves, maids and prostitutes/pimps. We can change that! The way we change that is to have equally diverse and talented people back-stage as on-stage.”
This is exactly it. Hopefully if we can get more (black, asian, hispanic, all WoC) female content producers, we’ll be able to see more PoC on our screens!
Click through to read more: 2014 is the Year Black Women Take Over Hollywood | Clutch Magazine
Related:
Blackout: Hollywood
The most offensive statement I’ve heard people make is, ‘If 12 Years hadn’t been released in 2013, The Butlerand Fruitvale would have had a better chance.’ Is there only room for one?” – Scott Feinberg
Oscars’ Insult to Black Movies: There’s Room for Just One (Analysis)
Sleepy Hollow Finale Thoughts
That’s how you do a season finale!
The first part had great humor then ramped up the creepy factor with poor Andy Brooks and the second ended on that MAJOR surprise factor that had every fan wondering how they didn’t guess it before!
One thing I love about this show is the three black girls looking out for each other. So rare for shows to show that dynamic, especially with women of color. I’ve seen some comparisons to Supernatural (which I don’t watch), and I definitely think it would be cool to see the Mills sisters interact more like Dean and Sam over on Supernatural. A Mills sister roadtrip? Macey hanging out in the back? Basically, Sleepy Hollow is the TV show equivalent of Disney’s Frozen, where sisterly love is made a priority. Jenny getting herself arrested so that she was forced away from her sister due to her murderous thoughts really made Abbie rethink everything she’d thought about her all those years. It certainly helps that Jenny is basically Lara Croft Tomb Raider. Except Tomb Raider isn’t lying on the side of the road at the end!
I shouldn’t have trusted Henry, but I still don’t think I trust Katrina. Henry was a surprised (mostly because he was featured so prominently in the Jeremy Crane backstory episode) but really I should have known because in any mystery/suspense show, the casting choice you recognize (the most famous of the guest stars) usually committed the crime! So really we should have all known. But I don’t trust Katrina, quite, either. It was too easy for her to let Abbie stay in purgatory knowing Moloch’s plan was to get her there all along. But perhaps that’s just the Ichabod/Abbie shipper in me.
Speaking of, I love the way they are adapting to each other’s quirks. Instead of it just being Ichabod using 21st Century lingo, Abbie signs off her voicemails “respectfully yours.” There’s an equality there that’s really great to see, considering it could be Ichabod doing al of the adapting. Comparatively, Ichabod and Katrina are now on uneven footing, since he’s using language she doesn’t understand (“…cool”). And who knows how she was feeling about that Crane and Abbie head-cradling hug, it was very tender. And fist bumps are definitely the truest test of friendship.
But now, no one can return to get Abbie out of Purgatory! Jenny is laid out on the side of the road, Ichabod is buried alive, and Katrina has been absconded by Headless! Even poor Captain Irving is locked away, trying to protect his family. I can’t wait until the Irvings are even more involved in the evil fighting team. I bet Macey and her science skills can help somehow!
And finally, I still say that Jasmine Guy needs to play a Mills relative, those eyebrows are too similar and I get constant views on my Lyndie/Jasmine post whenever Jenny is on screen. It needs to happen!
Zombie George Washington!
Related links:
http://insidetv.ew.com/2014/01/21/sleepy-hollow-season-finale-ep-mark-goffman-on-that-reveal-season-2s-new-faces-and-what-you-didnt-see/
Apparently, John Noble was told about Jeremy before he began, so this was the plan all along!
Yeah, I honestly don’t know how you’re going to get yourself out of this. How far are you into planning a way out of this huge pickle?
We definitely have ideas. Part of the fun of this show is taking these really big swings. So we’ll have to take some more to get them out.
They’re so cheeky, but I love how they have a plan. If only all shows 1. had a plan, 2. were allowed by the network to stick with it.
ConStar Watches Sleepy Hollow "The Indispensable Man” & "Bad Blood"
Quick summaries, click the link below before longer freak out/thoughts post!
The Indispensable Man
Andy returns and is still creepy. He reiterates the prophecy: Ichabod will deliver Abbie’s soul to Moloch. Then creepily confesses his love to Abbie before running away.
Meanwhile. Ichabod has discovered some more hidden clues in Washington’s Bible. There are 10 extra verses in the section on Lazarus, which lead them to George Washington’s secret gravesite to find a map. Abbie is concerned Ichabod will use the map to save Katrina but not focus on the greater good.
They retrieve the map in a true Masonic/National Treasure style crypt, but Andy’s been newly possessed by Moloch and hasn’t run out of his nine lives yet. Well, I suppose he does by the time the crypt collapses on him. Abbie urges Ichabod to destroy the map, since Andy told them Moloch could use it to bring war upon them. He does so, but not before committing it to memory. But War is coming to Sleepy Hollow…
Across town, Captain Irving’s family is under suspicion since a cop and a priest were murdered at the cabin he was keeping his family “safe” at. Macey is their number 1 suspect—DNA and all—and since Irving can’t say “a demon did it,” he confesses to the crime himself and gets sent to trial.
“Witness 1 paging Witness 2…”
“I am, respectfully, Lieutenant Mills.”
[receives smiley] “Oh. It’s a man’s face. I suppose that’s charming.”
“Poppycock!” “I know.”
“Yolanda was a much better listener.” [than Siri]
“Prophecies have a nasty way of fulfilling themselves if you let them…”
Bad Blood
An eclipse is coming tonight and by the time it is over, War (the Second [but really Third because we’ve briefly met Pestilence] Horseman of the Apocalypse) will arrive in Sleepy Hollow. It seems Abbie and Ichabod want to face it head on and retrieve Katrina from Purgatory [a scene which I need to revisit considering the ending—whose idea was it to go to purgatory?]. Jenny doesn’t approve of the plan, because she doesn’t want to lose her sister again, and the girls share a nice moment of hugs and remembering Chekov’s Dollhouse.
Abbie and Ichabod are warned not to eat or drink anything, as it will be a Lotus Eaters situation and keep them trapped in purgatory. Both wake up having received a great wish: Abbie is hanging with Corbin and Andy, alive and offering apple pie and Crane returns to his estranged father, having never been estranged because he never joined the Rebels. In Crane’s dream, the British won and he’s reunited with his father! Both come to their senses, but not before Victor Garber goes a bit demonic and chews on some glass. Together again, Abbie and Ichabod find Katrina, but here’s the deal: She can leave only if one soul takes her place. Abbie offers herself up, despite Crane’s protests—It’s what Moloch wanted this whole time!—and with the assurance he will come back for her.
But once back in the 21st Century, the Cranes are stopped by the 2nd Horseman, War, who has been among us this whole time! Turns out, our friendly, neighborhood Sin-Eater has been fooling us this whole time—he’s the second horseman! He’s what Moloch resurrected when the Mills sisters saw him 13 years ago, and he’s also Jeremy Crane, the buried alive son of Ichabod and Katrina! Jeremy/Henry/the Sin Eater gives an epic “Why I hate you, Mom and Dad!” speech, then allows Headless (Van Brunt of Legend of Sleepy Hollow lore) take Katrina away and Jeremy buries Crane alive, breaking the second seal as he does so. Jenny, having run down a lead, has been shot up in her car by Headless and remains on the side of the road, bleeding an unconscious, unable to help her sister who is trapped in Dollhouse Purgatory! We don’t get to find out what happens next until next Fall!
“Admit it. You appreciate me.” “Microscopically.”
Click here for Finale thoughts
ConStar Watches Sleepy Hollow "The Vessel"
A quick summation of “The Vessel” (mostly for archive purposes and because I wrote it up so might as well post it, even if a week late). Look for longer finale posts!
Crane attempts modern clothes and doesn’t like it. The demon who threatened Irving’s daughter arrives at the precinct to cause an immediate threat. Irving takes Macey to a cabin in the woods, but a demon uses Morales to follow them there and posses her. She kills a priest and demands George Washington’s Bible, which was buried with Ichabod. Turns out the same demon, Ancitif, once possessed Jenny and is after Abbie’s soul. In order to get rid of said demon, without giving up the Bible, the gang must search for a lantern that will cast Ancitif back to hell. Once there, the owners of the Bible, a bit of a red-neck family, attempt to stop our duo, but Jenny rolls in looking every bit Lara Croft Tomb Raider, and they all get to HQ in time to release poor Macey from looking like a horrible demon forever. Ichabod uses invisible ink tricks to discover a date written in the Bible in Washington’s hand, written 4 days after he died. Dun dun dun!
Quotes
“I want chapter and verse in my hands yesterday.”
“This place is booby trapped.” “Sounds unpleasant.” “Just watch where you step.”
Article Response: Whitewashed TV isn’t just racist. It’s boring! – Salon.com
In James Cameron’s “Avatar,” a white man once again plays savior, this time to a planet of tall blue aliens unambiguously suggestive of Native Americans. What if they’d cast Michelle Rodriguez, who plays a stereotypical no-nonsense doomed Latina side character, in the lead role instead of Sam Worthington? The context of an interesting movie about race is already in place. Without a single word changed in the script, “Avatar” would have taken on layers of new meaning, opened conversations that mainstream, white cinema has not even approached. […] Instead, though, we’re left with a cliché: the same old really nice white dude, filling a void in himself by appropriating and then saving another culture. What we could’ve had was something new: a story of intersectionality and solidarity across interplanetary colonialism.
via Whitewashed TV isn’t just racist. It’s boring! – Salon.com.
YES THIS ALL OF THIS!
There is constant complaining about the same old stories being told, especially in Hollywood. A very, very simple solution to spice those same old stories up, is to cast PoCs as the main characters. Then it becomes something new that we haven’t seen before.
The article speaks heavily of Sleepy Hollow; if Abbie had been a white guy, it would have been sooo boring–kind of how Almost Human felt to me. Karl Urban being the primary lead was boring. What if they’d switched the roles and Michael Ealy was the human, Urban the robot? Then it might have been a different story. I haven’t seen past episode 3, so I don’t know if Michael Ealy’s character has to deal with race at all in the futuristic world of the show, but it would have been prudent to introduce it in the first three episodes, since him being cast as a black man is a big deal in the real world. But since it wasn’t really mentioned at all, I think I got bored (for forgot to set my DVR to record all…) and wasn’t interested in coming back. I don’t need race to be a discussion, but it shouldn’t be glossed over. (this isn’t even what I started to talk about after I mentioned Sleepy Hollow above…)
It is so simple to change the dynamics of the same old stories we’ve heard before by changing the racial and sometimes gender identities of the characters. I don’t watch Elementary, but it took guts to cast an Asian woman as Watson, and look how that turned out for them. The show is great. They knew they couldn’t follow in the wake of Sherlock, so they changed the story in a very simple way to make it more interesting to people who have seen Sherlock and the RDJ Sherlock Holmes movies and might be bored with the same old “two white guys solve crimes” story.
Brief Response to: What every TV show can learn from Sleepy Hollow – The Week
What every TV show can learn from Sleepy Hollow – The Week.
Thank you Laura (the author of this article) for pointing out all the reasons why I love Sleepy Hollow and for not ignoring all the things all those other articles have been ignoring about the show. It’s diversity in race AND in female characters are both the biggest reasons why it’s doing so well, it’s social media and the storyline are important, but if the leads were both white men, it wouldn’t be doing as well as it is.
Some points from the article that I loved:
First and foremost, the series boasts one of the most diverse casts anywhere on television. Two of its four series regulars are African-American (Nichole Beharie and Orlando Jones), while all three of its most frequently recurring characters — played by John Cho, Lyndie Greenwood, and Nicholas Gonzalez — are people of color.
Even Grey’s Anatomy, probably the other highly diverse show on television (I can’t even think of others besides the one I will point out next), doesn’t have the percentages of PoCs/whites as this show does. PoC’s have the higher percentage on this show, Grey’s (this is definitely not an official count, just a gut opinion) probably runs 50/50? I think the other show that can boast great diversity on Sleepy Hollow’s level is Brooklyn 99, which has 2 white guys and 1 white woman in it’s main cast of 7; the rest are PoCs.
The same study observed that shows with the highest percentage of racial diversity in their casts also performed better in the ratings than shows with less inclusive casts. As the study’s author, Darnell Hunt, pointed out: “It’s clear that people are watching shows that reflect and relate to their own experiences.”
Why does no one in Hollywood want to admit this is a true thing or do anything about it? Hopefully networks will follow FOX’s example (something I am loathe to normally say– I don’t agree with some of their other storytelling traditions)
It’s as if women can maintain relationships without being defined by who they’re dating — a novel concept!
Love this line. While most of the conversations between these women actually do revolve around Ichabod (which is of course going to be the case–not a fault but a necessity), it would totally pass the Bechdel test (if perhaps, the Headless Horseman were a woman). Their conversations aren’t necessarily about their relationships with the men, but about how to save them (or destroy them).
Jones has embraced fan fiction, fan art, gifs, and the art of “shipping” — for bothSleepy Hollow and similarly fan-friendly shows like Supernatural — endearing himself to the show’s growing audience and helping to bring fan activities that were once considered niche or somehow shameful into the mainstream, reducing the stigma that’s still generally attached to demonstrating your appreciation for a piece of pop culture.
I’ve definitely appreciated OJs commitment to the fandom. I’ve been a part of various fandoms in my life, but always in secret (well–some parts in secret. I am an obvious nerd about a lot of things, but I have read fanfiction, for example, but don’t really talk about it because of what the author says: the stigma of fan activities. I definitely downplay some of my fan ways, which may lead people who know me to go “it could get worse?!” ;-)). So, while I haven’t delved that deeply into the Sleepy Hollow fandom, I appreciate that others are allowed to voice their opinions, share their work, and interact with the stars of the show, because pop culture and fandom make people feel less alone in the world. It really brings people together, so it’s nice that the sources of these feelings encourage it.
This article has some other gems, including:
Despite it being their number one new show, the network wisely decided that a less-is-more approach was more prudent, commissioning a second season without insisting on a back-nine episode order — a risk that might have led to a reduction in quality as the writers attempted to stretch a 13-episode story into 22 installments. Far too many network series wear out fans with too many meandering episodes, but Fox has ensured that Sleepy Hollow will leave viewers wanting more instead of overstaying its welcome.
I agree with this sentiment, it is better to let them control 13 episodes of story than to force them to then expand it into 22, which definitely messes many shows up; many writer’s rooms aren’t adept at handling that transition. This will be better for Sleepy Hollow and the fans in the long-run.
I am glad there is finally an article that speaks of all the points that make Sleepy Hollow the show to watch this season.
Related articles
- Why I think “Why Is ‘Sleepy Hollow’ A Hit?” from Forbes is Missing a BIG Factor (constarstudiestv.wordpress.com)
- Quote/Link: Fox TV Says That Diversity Is Just Good Business Sense [Shadow and Act] (constarstudiestv.wordpress.com)
- The Diversity of the Sleepy Hollow Cast Makes Me So Happy (constarstudiestv.wordpress.com)
ConStar Watches Sleepy Hollow "Sanctuary"
Dig Down to the Root Then Smash It to a Bloody Pulp
This week’s episode of Sleepy Hollow went in a new direction after last week’s Headless confrontation. We were given a few new threads to work with for the remaining episodes of the season. This episode acted as a hinge between the last few episodes and ones to come; a bit of a squeaky hinge that needs some oil but still got the job done. We’ll talk about the mysteries the episode gave us and which ones you are looking forward to solving the most.
Check the rest here! http://underscoopfire.com/sleepy-hollow-sanctuary/
Which are the ones you are most looking forward to finding out more about: The Crane Baby Boy, Macy’s Mysterious Accident, or the Mills’ Maternal Line?
When Sleepy Hollow returns in two weeks, the Sin Eater is back! I think that episode looks to bring us back into the serial story once again.
Happy Thanksgiving!