TV is diverse . . . until you notice who’s dying
Spoiler alert: This story contains spoilers for Sleepy Hollow, The Good Wife and other shows. Sometimes it’s good for a show to be at the unexpected intersection of two seemingly unrelated trends in television. And sometimes it’s not. The death of lead character Abbie Mills, played by Nicole Beharie, during the third-season finale of Fox’s supernatural drama Sleepy Hollow provoked howls of rage from fans, many of whom could not see the point in the show continuing without the female half of its central team (it’s not clear if the show will get a fourth season).
But it also gave a new and pointed focus to a larger issue or, rather, the collision of two larger issues: death and diversity.
Many feel that TV’s attempt to increase cast and character diversity is increasingly undercut by its equally new willingness to kill off popular characters. Especially those who are not straight white males.
Long before this year’s finale season, death came to a wide variety of non-straight-white-male characters, including several on the CW’s postapocalyptic drama The 100; early April saw the death of so many fictional women that some critics felt compelled to list them, like soldiers lost in a strange new war.
Not that the list was necessary. Fuelled perhaps by the superior attitude the television industry took during the recent #OscarsSoWhite controversy — look at us, we have Empire, Black-ish and the oeuvre of Shonda Rhimes — fans have been calling out the high fatality rate of minority characters for months now.
But when Sleepy Hollow killed Abbie, things got real.
For those who do not watch Sleepy Hollow, which is to say the vast majority of North Americans, her death may seem the very definition of a non-event.
A freshman hit, the show seemed to lose its way in Season 2 and, by Season 3, despite a change in showrunner, it was in how-did-this-happen freefall.
So it’s not terribly surprising that Beharie, who had previously drawn attention in the films 42 and Shame, decided to leave, or even that the writers chose to explain that departure by death.
Certainly the American television audience is used to loss. Having survived Sean Bean’s beheading in Game of Thrones, Dan Stevens fleeing Downton Abbey and Josh Charles’s murder in The Good Wife, we are a very different nation from the one that collectively collapsed on learning that Lt. Col. Henry Blake’s plane had been shot down over the sea of Japan after McLean Stevenson decided he’d had enough of M.A.S.H.
Except Abbie was one of two lead char- acters in Sleepy Hollow and even in today’s bloody clime, killing the lead is historically reserved for the dramatic final episode of a big hit (i.e. Breaking Bad).
More important, Beharie was one of the few non-white female leads on TV.
And some believe this was not just a case of a show failing and a star realizing she could do better elsewhere. Many “Sleepyheads” felt that Abbie’s story had been systematically sidelined in favour of that of her partner, Ichabod Crane (Tom Mison), which made Abbie’s decision to die to save him infuriatingly symbolic: the black female sacrificed to sustain another white-male-centric story line.
Yes, there are more non-straight-white-male characters on TV than before, and perhaps they seem equally represented in your favourite show, but overall white men continue to rule and everyone else exists mostly in the ensemble.
And while plenty of straight white guys get killed on TV too, when one falls another inevitably springs up to take his place. We miss Josh Charles, but would we trade Jeffrey Dean Morgan to get him back? Probably not. Because Will’s death on The Good Wife, though upsetting, was not in any way political.
And that’s what’s changed. With TV’s new status comes increasing responsibility. If you’re going to be at the vanguard of popular culture, then you need to, well, be at the vanguard of popular culture.
It’s the stories that have to change, not just the window dressing. In life, women are not the minority and, when taken together, neither are people who are black, Asian, Latino, LGBT or any other definition that television still sees as “non-traditional.” These characters should not be used as seasoning to give a white man’s story a little spice. They should be telling their stories too, in ways that don’t call for the ultimate sacrifice quite so often.
Where, one wonders, are the “If Michonne Dies, We Riot” T-shirts? Because I want one.