‘Empire’ Season Premiere Recap: The Lyon in Winter
“The season’s most unexpected hit” — that was the party line earlier this year when Fox’s music-industry Dallas starting posting blockbuster-level viewer numbers and quietly begin to revolutionize primetime TV. But in retrospect, you could say that Empire is really television’s most expected smash hit. That’s not to say that anyone specifically predicted that this series would become the most buzzed-about broadcast-network show in years. But compare it to the other two shows on TV right now that come closest to being old-school monoculture phenomena. Game of Thrones is a gory, sprawling dark fantasy based on a series of nerdcore novels about the physical and moral horror of violence. The Walking Dead is an equally bloody show, based on equally geeky source material, with essentially the opposite premise: As long as they’re already dead, violence is awesome.
Now look at Empire: A primetime hip-hop soap opera about one of America’s most popular art forms, starring a top-flight cast, soundtracked by Timbaland, and boasting a plot that moves at the speed of a runaway locomotive. Why wouldn’t this thing make millions for everyone involved?
The first season thrilled its gargantuan audience because it solved many of the problems endemic to catfight-filled melodramas without jettisoning the genre’s pulpy pleasures. The New Golden Age of TV has seen its share of “prestige” soaps, most notably Downton Abbey and Mad Men, but those shows dressed the suds up in respectable period drag. Meanwhile, more gleefully trashy fare like True Blood, Desperate Housewives, and Gossip Girl had a tendency to get stretched thin by overextended casts and peripheral storylines so pointless that you could barely remember the details after the cliffhangers and commercial breaks.
From the beginning, Empire did things differently. Creators Lee Daniels and Danny Strong and showrunner Ilene Chaiken keep the focus almost entirely on the nuclear (meltdown) family of musical genius/magnate Lucious Lyon and his formerly incarcerated but equally astute ex-wife Cookie; you could count the scenes in which either they or one of their three children (bipolar businessman Andre, semi-closeted singer-songwriter Jamal, and ambitious m.c. Hakeem) failed to appear on two hands with fingers to spare. No worries about superfluous scenes here.
Meanwhile, calling the series fast-paced would be like calling Usain Bolt a champion jogger. This is a show in which a minor character once shot a guy, got arrested, went to jail, and had people complaining “I can’t believe he’s still locked up” in the space of 12 seconds. (We counted.) There’s never a sense that we’re stuck a holding pattern boring bullshit to kill time until the next big moment — it’s all big moments, one after another, with only the genuinely catchy original musical numbers for a breather.
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