Abbie Mills Being Killed On Sleepy Hollow Just Goes To Show Me The Writers, Producers, And Showrunners

More thoughts

I posted this at Project Fox in the hopes that maybe they’d listen. I know. Crazy, right?

But I needed to do it for myself.

Interested to know all your thoughts, too. :)

I have thought about this a lot and I wanted to post an opinion here in the hopes that maybe someone at Fox would actually listen. Perhaps a futile hope, but one I wanted to attempt.

A lot of people are upset about the treatment of Nicole Beharie and the character, Abbie Mills, and how she represented a viewpoint of a severely underrepresented population in American TV. And I am fully sympathetic to that viewpoint, even if I can’t fully understand it, being a Caucasian woman myself.

I don’t want to address that here. What I want to do is to address the problem with the writing and direction of the show.

I’ve got 20+ years of experience in writing, in a myriad of forms. And I understand that television writing is a group effort with a lot of creative control over a script being out of the hands of any individual writer. Raven Metzner intimated as much himself in one of his interviews.

However, there needs to be someone at the helm with whom the buck stops–who has a definitive, overarching view of the overall narrative and where the story is headed.

And that, right there, is what the problem is with Sleepy Hollow.

The original fans of the show tuned in due to its crazy premise of a time traveling Ichabod Crane fighting monsters, in particular, the famous Headless Horseman, with the modern day police officer, Abigail Mills.

The second season tampered with what made it successful. It stymied the action by coming to dead halts in the narrative. Emotional problems for the Crane family became the focus of the story. So the fans who came for the romp with monsters and who weren’t interested in emotional drama left.

And what you were left with were either (1) fans of emotional drama who liked Katrina and the romance with Ichabod or (2) people who came for the relationship between Ichabod and Abbie–whether they wanted them together romantically or not.

These fans were your base.

And season 3’s removal of Katrina, Henry and Frank Irving took a lot of those characters’ fans with them. So you’re left with people who have stuck with the show only for Ichabod and Abbie.

Season 3 didn’t bring back the comic book boys because the mythology was suddenly changed. The Headless Horseman was captured. The definition of witnessing was retconned. The history of Ichabod Crane was retconned and ruined by having him have romps with Betsy Ross during the time period where he should have been in love with Katrina. Those creative choices made certain that the fans who watched the show for those reasons had no reason to return.

Season 3 had basically nothing happen. Interesting characters and mythology would be introduced, only to be destroyed in the next episode. The villains provided no real menace and lurked around doing nothing. The week to week episodes came off as if they reflected arguments in the writing room where one writer would attempt to push a certain aspect of the show forward–an Ichabbie moment, or a well written history moment or a particularly fleshed out B plot–and then, the next week, the next writer would gleefully stomp on what the previous writer had attempted to do.

It came off as incredibly disjointed and unprofessional. And it seemed as if it was an adage of too many cooks spoil the soup.

The only reason people remained is because of the talented ability of Nicole Beharie and Tom Mison to elevate the material and to find moments that rang true for the characters and kept the fans on the edge of quitting staying.

So to kill off Abbie Mills completely demolishes what is left of the show. The relationship of the two characters is the binding of the story. Without that binding, the book falls apart. It cannot survive.

The failure of the writing staff to understand that is what has killed the show. Whatever backstage arguments there were, and believe me, we know there were, are irrelevant to that fact.

A fourth season for Sleepy Hollow reincarnated as a historical X-Files would have to find a completely new audience.

The genre audience is small–and well networked. And no sane fan who reads the history of Sleepy Hollow and what terrible things they did to the mythology, the characters, the actors and the fans is going to touch the new season with a ten foot pole.

And the remaining fanbase died when Abbie did.

It is time for the creative people on Sleepy Hollow and the financial people at Fox to acknowledge the mistake, let the actors and crew free to find other work and cancel the show.

It is not saveable.

#married

[via]

orlando jones is a gift, at least

You know, I had the most bizarre dream last night. It involved me dying. I won’t bore you with the details–at least, the ones I can remember–but it was something about Pandora and Betsy Ross, and I don’t even know what. And I even went out with some bullshit line, which I can’t quite remember, but kind of implied that my entire existence was about Crane, which, like, I love the guy and all, but I have my own life. WTF, subconscious??

But I woke up, and Crane was in the kitchen complaining about “Why is the recommended serving size upon the package of this frozen pizza a fifth of the pizza when the pizza is a rectangular shape and will obviously not be cut into an odd number of segments?!” and I knew everything was fine.  

Dreams, amirite?

–Abbie

Farewell online privacy

All that extra negativity over every small detail has deterred me from engaging with the fandom as a whole. I know the writers have messed up but the last episodes have been interesting and even then it's impossible to please everyone.

and that’s a shame, really. i mean… i’ve been in this fandom almost from the very beginning. i’ve made some pretty good friends in it, too, like… best friends. so i’m grateful for just that. i love these people.

but i do get it. it’s annoying. and it’s tiring. and it’s discouraging. to come up in here after what i think is an awesome episode to gush and squeal and instead have to block half the posts in the tag or on my dash… it’s like being a kid in a birthday party with a cute balloon and some asshole poking it with a stick until it pops. 

and it’s like. i see articles about how sleepy hollow is so bad now and i’m like

tbh, i don’t trust anyone who saw s2 and can say that with a straight face. it is objectively false that s3 is worse than 2.

does the show still have flaws? sure. the monsters are pretty hit or miss, betsy ross is still inexplicably a thing, and sleepy hollow the town still feels more like a stage than an actual town since they categorically refuse to build it up with people who are not victims of the week. but just in s3b–just since we’ve been back–we’ve had:

character development for abbie up the wazoo

team b having just as much time apart from team a to feel like their own people and not plot devices (granted the balance is off sometimes but nowhere near the flustercuck that was pushing jenny and frank away to focus on clifford the big red fail)

sophie, who is amazing and lovely

actual progress on mythology-building. like, the hidden one is a bag full of dicks and pandora needs to shank him and take her rightful place as queen but their backstories were super interesting and the twist they put on the pandora’s box story was cool and something i’d never seen before

joenny. i like them together and apart so i’m adding it, idgaf. their relationship does seem to leap forward jerkily at times, but they’re cute together and i’m not rooting for them to fail

a crane who is neither an asshole nor a buffoon

progress toward canon ichabbie that has been inexorable. that’s not me being some naïve dope. every single episode since the midseason premiere has made sure to built up the emotional connection between crane and abbie–and not just wrt to the witness bond, i’m talking crane the man and abbie the woman. even when they’re apart the show makes certain to point out that they should be together. explicitly and implicitly. 

so to see all that glossed over because ichabbie isn’t fucking yet is… frustrating. because even if you’re watching for just them, you’re getting stuff! good stuff! but nope. let’s wallow in negativity forever because goffman was a blind dipshit.

goffman is gone.

s1 was only doubleplusgood in the first half and it’s not coming back (plus it had its problems, then, too).

the headless horseman turned into a pile of shit and the show is better without him.

the show has moved past frank irving. headcanon him happy with his family and just let it go.

does it suck they’re gone? yeah, a bit. but the show isn’t broken because of it, and it’s silly af to act like it is. 

to clarify: not wanting to participate in renewal campaigns or polls or whatever because we’ve been burned before is fine. totally cool. understand completely. but to actively hope it fails or to pick apart the show to where the whole thing is bad because ONE THING hasn’t happened quickly enough to suit you is clownish bullshit. it just is.

so yeah, i completely understand you not wanting to engage. i wish we were in a place where i could tell you to engage anyway because it’s fun, but it hasn’t been, really. not lately. truthfully, every day i think about joining you and just tracking tags and reblogging gifsets and basically writing off fandom completely.

but.

i will say that there are still good people around. if you like, i’ll point you to a couple, even. just know you’re not alone in your fandom fatigue, nonny bunny. not at all.

it’s not just that they killed her, it is the framing of her death, the idea that Abby’s whole purpose in life was to get Ichabod acclimated to the 21st century apparently? That her purpose was to be a footnote in Ichabod’s story, not a savior of the world as we were led to believe from the premise of the god damn show. It’s that we get this after two seasons of Abbie being treated like a secondary character when she’s one of the co-leads.

So this is it. The trending time is 3hrs. Why such a long trend?

Abbie’s death and our disappointment deserve a much longer time.

this is also a protest against Abbie’s treatment, not a memorial

this treatment is systemic and there are media projects featuring black female leads coming down the pipe, everyone needs to know that they can no longer do this easily and quietly

Why deserves instead of deserved?

 Abbie Mills Deserves Better is a classic tag for this fandom. Under the Abbie Mills Deserves Better tag we did so much. Forced a course correction in S2,got characters and storylines that were dragging the show down booted, and even got a show runner replaced.

In hindsight we understand it was already too little, too late, but its a powerful tag for us and we’re sticking with it. 

The trending period is three hours. The goal is to disrupt the tags and make as much noise as possible for as long as possible. We want to force them to deal with us just like we did before. 

I know some of you are depressed. You gave your all and no longer see a point, but there is point. Our Abbie deserves this, we deserve to do it for her. She was unique in all American television and now she’s gone. We cannot allow her to go quietly or peacefully into the night. We cannot allow them to say what they did was meaningful or right when we know it was wrong. 

To quote Zora Neale Hurston, “If you are silent about your pain, they will kill you and say you liked.” That is what they are trying to say about Abbie right now. 

We must have the final word, we must shout the truth for all to hear, Abbie Mills Deserves Better! 

We’re also inviting other fandoms and ships to participate with us. 

100:

I love the fact that some of you have reached out to us, and are asking about what happened and in turn I took a moment to read up a bit on the recent death of the character Lexa. We definitely have something in common both of our groups were promised representation, both shows used our needs and our interests to string us along and in the end the promises were betrayed in an all too familiar pattern. 

Your hours long twitter trend was amazing and we’d appreciate your help with the trend.

WestAllen,Olitz,Richonne and fam:

There is a lot of overlap. I watch The Flash, I’m still a Scandal viewer, I watched Merlin, some of you ship  Richonne, some of you watched True Blood, Doctor Who, some of you watched Person of Interest. 

We’ve all felt and experienced this before, its all too familiar and while Abbie was unique she had something very important in common with Martha Jones, Nyota Uhura, Queen Guinevere, Joselyn Carter, Michonne and too many others to name right now. I hope whether you watched Sleepy Hollow or not we can count on you show up and help us trend just like you know you can count on us, because this is for Abbie and all of you and all of us.  Let’s send Abbie Mills out with a bang not a whimper.

Crane Cooks from “Kindred Spirits”