When Sleepy Hollow premiered last year it was one of the most diverse show on television, and it got renewed after just one month. Now the show is in quite the opposite position.
We’re avid fans of Sleepy Hollow, and were from the moment it premiered on our screens. When we first laid our eyes on it, we knew that this show was going to be a hit, and it was! It had amazing ratings, it had a diverse crew, and Sleepy Hollow was the first fall pilot to get renewed for a second season.
There’s a reason for the show’s initial success. It was an incredibly unique mash-up of history and supernatural elements, it was action-packed yet also amazingly hysterical, and it peaked our interest every single week when we were following Ichabod and Abbie’s journey to becoming Witnesses.
But if you look at the show now, you’ll notice the ratings are suffering, the diversity it once had is gone, and the show has gone to Twitter to get fans to help convince Fox for a third season renewal with the hashtag #RenewSleepyHollow.
We’ve already voiced our plot concerns, so now it’s time to express our concern about the disappearance of the one quality that got us hooked from the very start: the diversity.
Your first thought might be, “Sleepy Hollow is still diverse,” but let’s point out to you what the two major characters on the show are: Caucasian (no surprise) and African-American. Even the side characters are made up of Caucasian and African-Americans (Henry, Irving, Jenny, Hawley, etc.). So, exactly how does that make the show diverse? Just because the show isn’t compromising of mostly white men?
Yes, given that Hollywood still favors white men the show’s addition of people of color helps change things up, but doesn’t mean the show is as diverse as it could be. We welcome any show that is able to create a cast that’s more than just white men, and we’re so glad that Sleepy Hollow is able to break the barrier, but maybe it’s time to break that barrier down a little more.
Remember that one guy who made the show really diverse? Yeah, we’re talking about Andy, played by John Cho, who was killed off at the end of the first season. He was the one person of color who wasn’t black, and even though he was a recurring character, it still made the show way more diverse than what was currently on TV. A black female protagonist, an Asian recurring character, and yes, the ever-so-popular white co-protagonist — that was TV gold.
After Cho left, we were wondering if the show would introduce another person of color to make up for his disappearance. Our questions were answered in the form of Sheriff Reyes, the racially ambiguous replacement sheriff that eased our discomfort for the two seconds she was on screen. While helping add some diversity to season 2, Reyes didn’t have a major part in the plot other than just getting Abbie in trouble occasionally. We appreciate the show’s attempt at re-diversifying the cast, but it was definitely a failed attempt.
And the best part is that we’re not the only ones that have this way of thinking. Last year we got to sit down with the amazingly gracious Orlando Jones for a short interview, where we discussed the show’s popularity and just how important diversity is in Hollywood.
When talking about the show’s diversity, Jones said, “And also, I was very proud of being part of a show that had the most multicultural diverse cast on network television ever. I’m inspired by that, I’m a multi-cultural person and I like seeing people of color and I don’t think that just means black people. We’re actually very well represented – Latinos, Asians, Middle Easterners are totally not represented as much as African-Americans are.”
Jones has a point there. We absolutely love how well represented African-Americans are on Sleepy Hollow, compared to dominantly white casts like Supernatural and Glee, and we definitely don’t want that to stop any time soon, but we’re left wondering if the other unrepresented minorities will get their time to shine on the show.
With Reyes being the only non-black person of color on the show, we don’t even know where her family is from. Not that it’s a huge deal, but some sort of representation would be welcome there. Additionally each of the cases that Abbie and Ichabod have gone to help with have helped victims who were white for the most part, and while we can believe that a small town in New York would have more white citizens we don’t believe that their contact with other minorities would be so minimal.
Sleepy Hollow could benefit from adding more people of color into the cast, and we hope that if Fox does give it a third season, they see the error of their ways and add not just one but several main characters that are not black or white, but a multitude of different races. Giving Reyes a more prominent role on the show would definitely be a start, and they could continue with that and introduce an angel other than Orion (since he’s Caucasian), who’s possibly Latino or Asian.
We don’t want to see this amazing show go, but we hope that it adds more to its color wheel than what it currently has.