At times, Fox's new hip-hop centered family drama Empirefeels like Dynasty by way of Jay-Z and Beyonce — or Glee with a beat.
Especially during scenes like the moment that pops
up early in Wednesday night's debut episode, when two brothers improvise a song
together during a house party that winds up sounding like it was pieced
together over weeks in a Los Angeles recording studio.
Credit musical director and hit hip-hop producer
Timbaland for spicing up Empire with head-turning tracks that actually sound
like they could be big radio hits.
Unfortunately, the show's plot is a little less
original: Terrence Howard plays Lucious Lyon, a rapper-turned-music mogul with
three sons; secretly stricken with a serious disease, he wants to groom an heir
as their company goes public.
"It can only be one of you," Lucious tells
his boys during a family meeting.
"What is this?" says one of them. "We
King Lear now?"
Lucious responds with anger: "Call it what you
want, smartass. ... In order for it to survive, I need one of you Negroes to
man up and lead it!"
Less King Lear than The Godfather, this succession
fight features three sons who seem little more than stereotypes: the clean-cut
son with a white girlfriend, trying to prove he's really black; the gay son
whose dad won't accept his sexual orientation; and the volatile hip-hop star
with more style than good sense.
Fortunately, this show has an ace in the hole.
Oscar nominee Taraji P. Henson eats up the scenery
on this show as Lucious' ex-wife Cookie. She's steely, streetwise and savvy
about the music industry. But she took a fall for Lucious, going to jail for 17
years so he could use $400,000 in drug money to start their company.
As the show begins, she's fresh out of the slammer
and threatening to derail everything if she can't manage her son's career.
"I've been living like a dog for 17 years, and
now ... I want what's mine," she tells Lucious while plunking on a piano
in his office. "I want Jamal."
This sets up one of many conflicts on the show, as
Cookie takes over managing their gay son, Jamal, and Lucious backs in-your-face
rapper son Hakeem. Clean-cut son Andre has subtly encouraged this — egged on by
his white girlfriend — in hopes that his two other brothers will destroy each
other.
Just like the films Daniels has directed, "The
Butler" and "Precious," "Empire" soars highest when
probing the conflicts and contradictions of the black family.
It's safe to say network TV has never built a show
around a black family quite like this. And that challenge inspired co-creator
Lee Daniels.
"There just hadn't been any African-American
television that I respected ... or hadn't been for a long time," he said
in a behind-the-scenes program about the series. "And I thought, what a
way to come and give you a provocative sort of look at a family in the hip-hop
world."
Some things don't work here. There are so many
storylines, the pilot seems overfilled with high drama. And positioning the
white girlfriend as a Machiavellian schemer with the duplicitous Andre seems a
troubling and too-obvious knock at black men who dare to date Caucasian women.
But Empire really clicks when showcasing this
wealthy black family that started out poor.
Lucious rides his sons hard. He tells one to
"take the bass out yo' voice when you talk to me," in an old-school
rebuke to kids who dare to talk back.
And in a flashback scene to when Jamal was a young
child, we see Lucious spot him wearing women's shoes and attack him, trying to
dump him in a trash can.
But Cookie stops her husband, comforting Jamal. The
incident resembles a story Daniels told about his own childhood duringan
interview with Out magazine a few years ago, hinting at how personal some of
these plotlines are.
Empire debuts at 9 p.m. EST Jan. 7 on Fox
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