Sleepy Hollow miraculously pulled off a Season 4 renewal and Fox's president explains how it happened.
Sleepy Hollow season four doesn't premiere until the midseason, but that doesn't mean we're not eager to figure out what the heck this show will look like when it returns to broadcast TV after the baffling death and exit of one of its two main stars, Abbie Mills (Nicole Beharie). When Sleepy Hollow comes back, it will be set in D.C. (no, not in Sleepy Hollow, the town from which it gets its name) and will see Janina Gavankar joining the cast as the new witness.
Here's everything we know so far about what Sleepy Hollow season four will look like...
Sleepy Hollow Season 4 — The Latest News
We've got our first official look at Ichabod Crane (Tom Mison) and new witness Diana (aka Janina Gavankar) in action. Though attendees to the Sleepy Hollow New York Comic Con panel were privy to a video sneak peek of season four, we'll have to make do with this image, courtesy of TVLine...
Sleepy Hollow Season 4 Cast
Sleepy Hollow is going to look completely different in season four. In addition to Beharie, season three regulars Zach Appelman (Joe Corbin), Nikki Reed (Betsy Ross), Shannyn Sossamon (Pandora), Lance Gross (Daniel Reynolds), and Jessica Camacho (Sophie Foster) have all left the show.
Tom Mison (Ichabod Crane) and Lyndie Greenwood (Jenny Mills) will be back. As for other former cast members, The Headless Horseman (Neil Jackson) will be back at some point in season four and it was just announced that John Noble will be returning in season four, presumably as Ichabod's late son Jeremy/Henry Parrish...
Former True Blood star Janina Gavankar joins the cast as Diana, the new hot-headed badge with whom Tom Mison's Ichabod Crane will partner, battling supernatural threats and occasionally each other, since she happens to be a staunch skeptic. Speaking to TVLine about what that dynamic will look like, Mison said:
[Diana] has just lost her partner, and doesn’t believe in the supernatural world, and is thrust into it with a man from 250 years ago. That might sound a little familiar from maybe three years ago. So she, having lost her partner, and Ichabod loses his… there is a hole that needs to be filled, whether they will admit it or not. Janina and I seem to have found something quite nice, where we don’t want to fall straight into each other’s arms and be partners. And hopefully — I haven’t seen any episodes yet — but hopefully, that reads.
Former Lost fan favorite Jeremy Davies has also jumped onboard as a villain, playing a malevolent tech mogul named Malcom Dreyfuss. Additionally, cross-genre Fox network synergy will see Masterchef Junior contestant Oona Yaffe join the series to play Diana’s daughter Molly Thomas.
Jerry MacKinnon (Empire) will appear as Jake Wells, an "eager but slightly obsessive research analyst who works in a forgotten federal archive cataloging reports of supernatural activity." He and Crane will become friends. Rachel Melvin (Awkward) will appear as engineering prodigy Alex Norwood, someone who works with Jake in the supernatural archives.
As for former star Nicole Beharie, she’s recently jumped aboard a film remake of Jacob’s Ladder. However, showrunner Clifton Campbell hinted to TVLine after the airing of the April Season 3 finale that, despite her character Abbie Mills being “gone,” that Beharie could still return for guest spots – intriguingly enough, just not as Abbie Mills.
Consequently, the pitch that apparently so intrigued the big brass at Fox may very well have involved a unique manifestation of Nicole Beharie’s former Abbie Mills character, potentially reinvented as someone (or something) else for sporadic spots in Season 4.
Sleepy Hollow Season 4 Release Date
Sleepy Hollow season four doesn't have an official release date yet, but we know it will be returning to Fox's primetime schedule sometime midseason.
Sleepy Hollow Season 4 Renewal
At the Television Critics Association summer press tour, Fox entertainment president David Madden revealed the mindset behind this most surprising of reprieves for Sleepy Hollow. It certainly wasn’t an easy decision, especially with so many downsides to consider with Tom Mison’s lost-in-time Colnonial-era-sent slayer of the supernatural Ichabod Crane seemingly left with little purpose. As Madden explains of the state of the series after the exit of Beharie’s Abbie Mills:
“This was obviously a very hard conversation. Crane and Abbie were the spine of the show in a lot of ways, so it was difficult to figure out if it was right thing to do, to continue or not. But the producers pitched us an array of new characters and new situations for Crane to get into.”
Presumably, the ideas pitched by the producers were intriguing enough to make Madden and the rest of the Fox brass take note and consider the formerly buzz-heavy Sleepy Hollow– undoubtedly damaged by multiple seasons of sloppily executed storylines and sagging ratings – as a budget-heavy branding that is still worth salvaging. The oft-discussed upcoming overhaul of the series – migrating the show’s setting away from its titular small New York town to Washington D.C. – was pitched to Fox execs, as were the initial scripts. As Madden explains:
“The first seven scripts are really fun. We think there’s a lot of good new stories to tell.”
Sleepy Hollow will make its expectations-defying return on Fox sometime in early 2017.