EMPIRE: IN LIKE A LYON…OUT LIKE A LAMB

Empire is an American Musical Drama television series created by Lee Daniels and Danny Strong for Fox that ran from January 7, 2015 to April 21, 2020. The show is set in New York, and centers on the fictional hip hop music and entertainment company, Empire Entertainment, and the members of the founders' family as they fight for control of it. The show stars Terrence Howard, Taraji P. Henson, Bryshere Y. Gray, Jussie Smollett and Trai Byers as members of the Lyon Family, along with a supporting cast including Grace Byers, Kaitlin Doubleday, Gabourey Sidibe, Ta'Rhonda Jones, Serayah, Malik Yoba and Vivica A. Fox.

The show currently has an 84% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with an Audience Score of just 48%. It also has a Metascore of 72 (based on only 62 critic reviews) on Metacritic, with a User Score of 6.4, and a 7.4/10 on IMDB (based on over 40,000 reviews).

This show started off with a bang, leaning heavily into its own spectacle, something that made it different…shinier than musical shows that came before it (like Glee). The premise was interesting and the writing felt fresh and honest, even though the show was extra heavy on melodrama, and Taraji was absolutely brilliant playing the recently released, former drug-dealing felon, “Cookie”.

And even if all of that weren’t enough to get your curiosity peaked back then, the show had a secret weapon…it boasted the best music soundtrack ever played on television. Timbaland, Jim Beanz and Ne-Yo are just some of the well-known producers that had a hand in creating the music for the shows Grammy nominated soundtrack. There were also appearances throughout the series from top artists the likes of Mario, Courtney Love, Estelle, Mary J. Blige and Mariah Carey.

Upon re-watch, the show began to decline around about season 3, even with Taraji’s remarkable performance and the music still being more than enough to continue watching, mostly because with shows like these (primetime soap operas) the storyline tends to go off the rails over time, and that’s what happened here. The overall story arc became extremely circular in nature, highly dependent on the characters continuously making the same mistakes over and over again.

Another thing that I believe left a bad taste in my mouth where the series is concerned is the change in episode count in the final season. Empire had utilized exactly eighteen episodes for the first five seasons of its run, only to change the number of episodes to twenty in its final season. I didn’t really understand this choice because after watching the last season, I think eighteen episodes was more than enough to land the plane. But because they added those two episodes, we never got to see how the story actually ended because the last two episodes never aired, due to the industry shutting down because of the Covid-19 pandemic. And what’s interesting is that episode eighteen could have worked as a finale if not for the fact that they had been flashing forward to what looked like the end of the story the showrunners had envisioned had the last two episodes been completed.

In all honesty, this show has me conflicted. Because while the show was a hot mess in some ways, completely wasting the potential it had to tell a story about how chasing fame and money can make one cost themselves the things in life that really matter, there were still slivers of performative brilliance to behold, both on the acting and the musical side of the overall presentation. During its run, it was one of the most-watched television shows on Fox, but as the Audience Score on Rotten Tomatoes bears out, a lot of the shows viewers were left unsatisfied with the series as a whole.

If you have yet to see Empire, it’s available to watch on HULU with a subscription, and can be purchased by the episode on Vudu, Amazon Prime Video and Apple TV.