Talk Isn’t Cheap For Empire
More than 17 million viewers tuned in to watch the season 1 finale of Fox’s breakout smash Empire. Move over The Big Bang Theory and your predominantly white cast, there’s a new show on top. They say talk is cheap – but not for a television show. Talk propelled this show to new heights almost every week, like a rollercoaster only going up. Word of mouth is a powerful tool.
Some love it, some hate it. Some hate watches it. Whatever your feelings about it, you can’t deny, the show bloody works.
Some critics suggest that the show has attained this level of success by perpetuating stereotypes. One of those critics, Boyce Watkins, called the show a “ghetto-fied hood drama”. The show has also been criticized for glorifying gangsters and drug dealers.
It feels like the show is dealing with character types rather than real, complicated full-fledged characters. Lucious Lyon, portrayed by Terrence Howard, is an old-gangster-turned-music-mogul who is conservative and homophobic. During a flashback scene, he drags his son, Jamal, a small kid at the time, out of the house and dumps him in a dustbin after Jamal walked around in his mother’s high heels in front of guests. Cookie Lyon, portrayed by Taraji P. Hensen, wife of Lucious and mother of Jamal, comes to his rescue.
That’s how the show deals with homophobia, a pretty clichéd narrative in the black community. Jamal is a gay singer-songwriter who is despised by his homophobic father. Their relationship is strained to say the least, but in season one finale, Lucious makes Jamal his successor. Being willing to kill for Empire Records seems to have done the trick. Co-creator Lee Daniels wanted to portray how deeply ingrained homophobia is in the black community, being an openly gay man himself. Their approach to this, however, is uneven.
Cookie defends her Jamal when Lucious dumps him in the dustbin. When she is eventually released from prison after 17 years, she works her way into being his manager, defending his interests against his father’s. Yet, behind his back, she belittles his sexuality in a conversation with his father, mocks it. Racial slurs like “faggot” is ingrained into this show’s language. Does Cookie really approve of her son’s sexuality? What does this say about the show’s standpoint against homophobia?
To say that Cookie Lyon is Empire’s most popular character is putting it mildly. One could argue that Cookie has catapulted the show to what it is today. Comment sections are all about Cookie. Cookie slays. Yup. She does. She is bad ass.
Some critics would suggest that she is just bad. The character has been criticized for being a representation of all the stereotypes black women in the entertainment industry face. A black woman with ostentatious taste – the fur, the painted nails, the eyelashes – she’s a gay guy’s best friend. She comes compact with a short temper and a foul mouth. Her youngest son Hakeem, the stereotypical arrogant somewhat talented hip-hop artist, calls her a “bitch”, and she hits him with a broom.
Other critics ascribe the popularity of Cookie to the same wave of success Shonda Rhimes has achieved with strong black female leads on her shows Scandal and How To Get Away With Murder. Olivia Pope and Annelise Keating are much stronger characters that portray what it is like for black women in a white world. Cookie Lyon defines too many stereotypes to compete against the likes of Olivia Pope, a strong career-driven woman with sophisticated style who has an affair with a white president. A flawed and imperfect lead who tries to redefine the role of a black woman on primetime television – something that Cookie Lyon is still struggling to achieve.
Then there’s Andre, Lucious and Cookie’s oldest son, the CFO of Empire Records. A well-educated, smart, suit-wearing “sell-out” who is afraid that he won’t inherit the company when his father passes away. Being the only member of the family who is not musically inclined, he’s paranoid that his father won’t give him the company. Turns out – Lucious is not dying. He was misdiagnosed. No ALS.
What does a successful black man need by his side, according to stereotype? A white woman. Andre has one. His blonde wife, Rhonda, is manipulative and ambitious, stoking the fire, egging Andre on to take drastic measures to ensure that he inherits Empire Records. The manner in which she sticks with him through his illness – the paranoia, the outbursts and the breakdown - is what makes their relationship feel more authentic. It is a narrative that allows the show to counter the stereotype. Big plus.
Lucious’s now ex-fiancé, Anika, is a light-skinned, sophisticated black woman – the opposite of what Cookie represents? Anika is sophisticated and comes from a debutante background; her father is a doctor, so naturally their well-educated and successful. Anika, like Rhonda, is also manipulative and ambitious, working very hard to stake her claim on Empire Records. Is the casting of light-skinned women to portray manipulative, ambitious women standing behind successful black men a stereotype and character type the show perpetuates?
During an appearance on Access Hollywood, Terrence Howard said, “I believe if we’re gonna really tackle racism, if we’re gonna tackle bigotry, if we’re gonna tackle homophobia, we need to attack it dead on”. He added “...we need to take the sutures, open up the problem and reach in and grab it”. This was all in reasoning for him wanting to hear the n-word used in the show next season.
Does incorporating the n-word into a show about African-Americans really combat racism and make the show feel more authentic? Being from a country like South Africa with its own racial troubles, it’ll cause huge uproar if a show incorporates the k-word into their language. It’s not a word South Africans throw around. It’s a derogatory word aimed at causing harm and could result in legal action. The n-word is thrown around constantly in American pop culture to the extent that it’s losing its weight. Incorporating a derogatory word into a show’s language would perpetuate the complete misperception of the word.
One could also argue that incorporating the word would allow it to lose its power and its meaning. Losing its weight could potentially lead to the word having no hold over its victims. New Late Show host Trevor Noah seems to think so. In one of his comedy specials, he jokes that if all South Africans use the k-word, just say it repeatedly, if all South Africans call each other the k-word, the word would lose its meaning and its power to harm.
Does that constitute attacking racism and bigotry dead on? Possibly. Would it work? Maybe not. Does its incorporation of the word “faggot” work to attack racism? Probably not.
However you analyse Empire, the show is a huge success. It has the reach to truly portray what the lives of African-Americans are like, to truly give viewers a glimpse into real lives. If you judge Empire as merely a melodrama, a very entertaining primetime soap, its great television. If the creators want for the show to be truly groundbreaking, they will need to work on developing these characters, make them real, give them depth, and not just let them be a range of character types or stereotypes.
As a primetime melodrama, this show kicks ass. It’s helluva lot of fun.
Empire, though, has the potential to be more.
