*Now this is some good writin’ and makes for some good readin’, too. We’re referring to an article at Grantland from writer Wesley Morris about network TV’s hottest new show in decades, “Empire” on Fox.
Morris says he’s never seen anything that gets away with everything “Empire“ gets away with — murder, basically.
“I’ve never seen anything on network television this shameless; this overwritten yet perfectly plotted; this ludicrously costumed, art-decorated, choreographed, soundtracked, acted, and directed; this hormonal, this … black.”
Here’s an excerpt of his story:
Empire’s ideas about race operate at a higher degree of difficulty than even Scandal, one of the most sexually and racially adventurous shows ever to appear on television. Like Scandal, Empire brings a crazed racial odyssey to a major network. Unlike Scandal, it’s not situated in a world of delicately maintained façades. Washington politics requires a kind of politesse, a brand that the show’s architect, Shonda Rhimes, has polished to perfection. Empire has no reliable sense of decorum. This is a world in which people peep and creep, but mostly they barge into rooms and blast the truth with an alacrity that would appall Scandal’s heroine, Olivia Pope. Secrets are a form of currency on Scandal. They’re a cancer on Empire. And bluntness appears to be a form of chemotherapy.
If Cookie and Olivia switched cities, it’d make for fascinating, funny television, but neither world could remain intact for long. Cookie would expose a whole city’s skeletons and be immediately out of a job. Olivia would provide withering scrutiny of the record label’s business plan, then disinfect all the tabletops, desktops, and backseats. That such a hypothetical, fan-fiction switch would fail indicates the diversity of blackness currently on dramatic television. There’s a relative wealth where 30 years ago there was only impoverishment.
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FOX
Cookie’s big mouth and Henson’s paint-bomb acting steal the show. But Lucious is the real piece of work. Over the course of the 12 episodes, he behaves in appalling ways: He kills Cookie’s cousin. In a flashback, he catches young Jamal sashaying in heels and stuffs him into a garbage can. He cheats on Anika with Cookie, then tells Cookie he’s leaving Anika, but doesn’t tell Cookie he’s changed his mind until Cookie arrives, in a bustier, at the dinner where Lucious and Anika announce their engagement. He refers to one of his artist’s girlfriend as a “thot.” He berates nurses and employees and his own sons, all while suffering tremors, cold sweats, and one of those talking-in-your-sleep jags that another character is shocked to overhear. He calls Rhonda all kinds of “white bitch,” and he turns out to be the father of the gay son’s surprise daughter.
To watch a nutty narcissist like Lucious in television’s current landscape — whose final shot puts him, for the moment, behind bars — is to be able to place him alongside Robert Durst of The Jinx and any of the other evil, so-called antiheroes who’ve been hogging the plots on series television for years. This is remarkable only in the sense that Lucious is a black male who behaves with what a district attorney might call impunity. He’s unfazed by his crimes and by Cookie’s seething return. I don’t know how long a show this over-the-top can continue to clear the bar. I don’t know that the writing will ever culminate in a role for Howard as good as James Gandolfini’s Tony Soprano, Jon Hamm’s Don Draper, Bryan Cranston’s Walter White, or Clive Owen’s John Thackery. But Lucious Lyon has more in common with them than with the men you’re also inclined to think about as you watch Empire: Wesley Snipes in New Jack City, say, or Denzel Washington in Training Day, or Howard himself in Hustle & Flow. There’s a cool about Lucious that explains his magnetism. The last TV character as blithely contemptible and contemptuous as Lucious was 30 Rock’s Jack Donaghy. It’s an amazing irony: In being unapologetic for its blackness, Empire enters unsavory territory typically reserved for white male characters and often played as comedy.
On Scandal, blackness functions as an exhilarating third rail. On Empire, it’s the entire power source.
Find out what else Wesley Morris has to say about “Empire” – and it’s a LOT – at Grantland.
Great Grantland Article on ‘Empire’ Puts Black TV Drama in Perspective
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