EMPIRE: On Watching The Soap Opera With Hip-Hop Flavor

Money, power, glory, sex, sin, family, secrets, intrigue, melodrama and music. Mix them together, with a dash of messy black realness, and Empire has caught me.

There was no way I thought I’d enjoy Empire as much as I am.

Sure, if you tell me the principals from Hustle & Flow – actors Terrence Howard and Taraji P. Henson – would pair up with Lee Daniels, the man behind batshit projects such as Shadowboxer and Precious, there’s no way I wouldn’t check that out.

Plus, just for blerdy bona fides, I had to show at least some passing interest in another primetime network TV show with black faces heading the cast. Especially if that show doesn’t have Shonda Rhimes involved, as her stuff is ratings gold and wouldn’t need my help.

But a music drama? About hip-hop? On FOX? This is gonna need some viewership, most definitely.

Well, the show got some help. Ratings are good, and have increased each week in its first month. Why is it working? Why do I love this show?

Soap opera is fun!

Mind you, I don’t really watch soap operas. And, for the most part, neither does America, as the genre keeps losing shows year after year. But I have seen years’ worth of The Young and the Restless thanks to my parents. If I go to my grandmother’s house on a weekday afternoon, I’ll wind up in a vortex of Y&R, The Bold and the Beautiful, and The Days of Our Lives.

It all seeped into me from an early age. My ‘80s childhood was the heyday of primetime soaps. You did not dare disturb my mother during Dynasty, Dallas, Knots Landing or Falcon Crest. Such worlds full of shoulder pads, sequins and chiffon, heavy makeup, rueful cads,  and hair higher to God.

And, like Erica Kane and Alexis Carrington Colby, Empire made its best character a hard-as-nails queen bitch covered in gems and luxuriant hair, sporting heels as sharp as her tongue. All hail Cookie Lyon, and Taraji P. Henson has never been better. (Also, the D.C.-area native sounds far more Philadelphian than Howard.) From her first scene on, Cookie is a perpetual quote machine and personifies the phrase “don’t make me get ethnic on you.”

Empire follows in the soap opera tradition for sure. All the main characters with their own personal dramas, and the sparks flying hot and fast when they intersect.

A dying mogul choosing his heir among three sons! An ex-wife fresh from prison, ready for revenge, and trying to duck the feds! The overachiever son hiding mental illness! The gay son spurned by his father! The coddled punk struggling to find his own identity with serious mommy issues!

Cue that dramatic organ vamp.

I didn’t think going in that Empire would be this soapy. I didn’t expect to be watching a primetime soap. But on top of my own personal history with soaps being around me, there’s the fact that I already have been consuming soap operas lately in my nerd TV shows. We just don’t call them that.

Consider me among the Arrow faithful. Sure, it’s been crazy workout montages, martial arts action sequences, stunts and explosions a-plenty. But more than half the show is the romantic misadventures of Oliver Queen.

Yup, totally not a soap opera-like display of abs. So. Many. Abs.

If you can spend a large amount of discourse on a show with the phrase, “Did you see what so-and-so said to such-and-such but can’t say this-and-that?” then you’re watching a soap opera!

I loved the Starz series Spartacus. Gladiator battles, extreme blood and guts, constant war, and over-the-top nudity and sex scenes – of straight, gay and bi flavors – that made Game of Thrones look like Dog With A Blog.

Oh, and tons of soap opera standards: catty rivalries, lovers torn apart, sex betrayals and secrets, even bully-induced murder, and the old “we used to be friends” catharsis.

The most sexually tense we’re-just-friends beer you’ll ever drink.

Battlestar Galactica spent tons of time on the Starbuck-Apollo romance, and the fate of humanity hinged on the love affair of a horny scientist and an android. Not to mention about six other romance plots driving the action of the show in the domestic setting of a large spaceship.

(And, in case you missed it, BSG honcho Ronald D. Moore is delivering on soap opera-turned-science fiction again with Outlander.)

All those WWE fans out there? You’re watching soap operas that are broken up by a bunch of fights. The matches themselves, while impressive, aren’t why the audience stays. They need the soapiness of everything around the matches to give the audience someone to relate to, and to add personal stakes.

Sure, the fanboys go apoplectic when describing sci-fi and fantasy as romance or soap opera. Such is another one of the small-yet-large ways our sexist world works by how things are gendered.

Empire is draped in the alpha dog street-level masculinity of hip-hop, so placing drug deals, drive-bys and boasts of riches alongside the heavy domestic drama of soap opera may seem incongruous.

I admit up front that the show traffics strongly in unrealistic stuff. Terrence Howard, with that voice, sounds like no Philadelphian I’ve ever heard. I’ve never seen a huge rap star with straightened hair in a conk like Denzel in Malcolm X. The flashbacks of Howard and Henson showing off their educated musical chops while detailing drug deals are ludicrous.

But I’ll say this: the real-life Lucious Lyons of the world, your Jay Z and Diddy-level guys, are streetwise multimillionaires living in two separate worlds. Jay still has his Brooklyn street voice, but this is the same guy hanging out in French mansions. Howard himself brings suave charisma mixed with an unsavory past that includes several run-ins with the law regarding alleged but unprosecuted violence against women. We only speculate at what kind of bodies Jay Z, a former drug dealer, may have in his past.

In a hip-hop landscape with Frank Ocean and Kid Cudi, a queer or queer-friendly male rapper in the mainstream is here. Empire, penned by the out Lee Daniels, even plays with the irony of the girls-girls-girls hedonist Hakeem (Bryshere “Yazz” Gray), draped in jewelry, fanciful haircuts and lip gloss, looking queened out next to his gay brother, Jamal (Jussie Smollett).

Empire has something better than reality powering it so far, and that’s realness. Not reality, but realness. The best scenes are performed with a deep, messy honesty you’re used to seeing in Daniels’ work such as Precious, The Butler and Monster’s Ball. The situations can be contrived, outlandish or outrageous, but the emotions and the relationships carry a visceral stickiness to them.

The realness of Daniels’ aesthetic enhances, or masks,  the church-play melodrama that keeps Daniels alone from being particularly great. You sink your fingers in, and it won’t let go.

There’s a realness to the flashback of Lucious putting a toddler-aged Jamal in a trash can after he dressed in his mother’s shoes and jewelry. Read enough stories about gay people abused, disowned and mistreated by their parents, and you know how real it is. Daniels himself said it’s based on something that happened to him.

When Hakeem stays involved on-the-low with a fashion designer at least 20 years his senior (played by Naomi Campbell), the realness of her insisting he call her his mother just cuts into you after episodes of seeing his severe mother issues.

Some of the show’s dives into “dirty laundry” of Afro-American community conversations border on trolling, and have yielded some of the weaker, or crazier, scenes of the show: the “jungle fever” nightmare of Ivy League-educated Andre (Trai Byers) and his white wife Rhonda (Kaitlin Doubleday), and the battle of one-upsmanship between Cookie and Lucious’ lover/business partner Anika (Grace Ealey), a light-skinned, biracial, Swedish-speaking debutante.

The show hasn’t spent enough time with Andre and Rhonda to get beyond the stereotypes (including lots of ridiculous sex stuff so far), but a scene where Andre makes up an alibi for Lucious’ whereabouts at the time of an associate’s murder, paired with a flashback of child Andre hiding his father’s gun when police raid their apartment, shows promise and needed depth.

In another episode, Rhonda echoes Cookie’s “pretty white girls are always brilliant” line back to Cookie, giving more punch to her character beyond hitting sexy Lady MacBeth mode and repeatedly having Andre (literally) by the balls.

I’m also waiting for when Anika, in her battle with Cookie redolent of colorism and class issues, is not just a “fake” foil to the “real” Cookie, but gets some wins of her own. She may threaten Cookie with the sparklingly catty line about being able to “cut your throat without even disturbing her pearls,” but she didn’t acquit herself well during that drive-by shooting while she and Lucious tried to sign Titan.