‘Empire’ Recap: When Life Gives You Lyons…
If Lemonade exists in the Empire-verse, the Lyon family must be wondering what the fuss is about. An R&B record that uses extremely thinly veiled autobiographical tales of family turmoil as fodder for art? That’s pretty much every song Lucious, Jamal and Hakeem have ever made. Here in the real world, though…well, once you’ve heard Beyoncé’s latest, “Boom Boom Boom Boom” sounds a whole lot less impressive. Now her cathartic confessional album is threatening to do to this series musically what the presidential primary already kinda did to it politically: take a show that depends on feeling utterly of-the-moment and make it feel out of date. Like, can a coffee-house performance of a song called “Good Enough” really compete as a statement of personal freedom with, er, “Freedom”?
Maybe this is an undue burden to place on “More Than Kin,” this week’s Empire episode. It could just as easily have been a comparison with fallen genius Prince, whom Jamal evokes with his live-band presentation, high falsetto, and “am I straight or gay” sexuality, and that wouldn’t have been fair either. As fun as the music on this show has been, it’s not really meant to go toe-to-toe with the titans of pop, Timbaland production notwithstanding. But – perhaps due to the season’s two-part structure and longer total running time than the short, surprise-hit Season One – the story is getting a bit soft, or more than a bit. That’s when you start noticing problems you might otherwise have overlooked, or never even thought of as a problem at all.
Take the Annika pregnancy plot (please!). “Baby mama drama” is such a common concept that you were probably sick of hearing the term alone ten years ago, let alone seeing it play out yet again in a high-profile primetime soap. So far, nothing that’s happened here has been surprising enough to merit going to this tapped-dry well. Getting knocked up to force her way into the family, assaulting a rival, having a health scare, meddling grandparents, a jealous fiancée – we’ve seen it all as many times as any maternity-ward nurse. The writing even walks into the icky idea that stressed-out pregnant women are essentially killing their babies, as if docile brood mares would be preferable to real human beings. (Or backstabbing creeps in Annika’s case, but you get the point.)
A similarly hoary and, frankly, sexist trope pops up in the form of Harper, the high-powered journalist who’s been working on a profile of Lucious for the past couple of episodes. “Lady reporter sleeps with source” is such a common plot device in movies and television you’d think journalism school was just a form of Tinder that leaves you tens of thousands of dollars in debt, yet it has so little basis in the real-life behavior of women in the field that to promulgate the notion is borderline offensive. Her behavior after Lyon cuts their liaison short is equally odd: Rather than publish the evidence that his “late” mother is still alive – a scoop if ever there was one, especially after he and Cookie conspired to help a competing site post a profile of him first – she just hands the photos to Andre in order to stir up trouble in the family. Once again, the professional takes a back seat to the personal.
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