'Empire' Premiere Review: Making Great Music Creates Great Drama

Empire
Empire

Empire's premiere episode has more energy and ideas than a dozen other pilots that I've seen recently. This saga of a budding musical dynasty takes its TV-history influences for granted — they include Dynasty and Dallas — and the series hits the ground running, letting the viewer fill in the narrative gaps. In other words, Empire is that rare nighttime soap opera that credits its audience with understanding without a lot of tiresome explanation, and whose purpose is to entertain, to surprise, and to confuse. This show certainly understands there's a lot of pleasure to be gleaned from artfully shaped confusion.

The drama stars Terrence Howard as Luscious Lyon (!), head of Empire Entertainment. Luscious, who started out with nothing but a cynical career in gangsta rap, has learned everything he knows about the music biz through hard-won experience, a quality he sees missing in each of his three very different sons, all of whom want to be major players in the family business. But none of these men has banked on the abrupt return of Cookie (Taraji P. Henson), Luscious's ex and the mother of those sons. Cookie is freshly freed from prison (in the same way Henson seems invigoratingly liberated from Person of Interest). She operates from a place of belligerent swagger, a hardness formed, perhaps, to survive 17 years in the slammer?

Rather than be humbly grateful for her family's tepid welcome home, Cookie comes out swinging: She immediately demands an executive position at Empire Entertainment, a company she helped found before landing in jail. She also insists on resuming a tough-love maternal role that finds its most startling expression in a blunt declaration of support for her gay son, Jamal: "I want to show you a faggot really can run this company."

Trai Byers, Taraji P. Henson, Terrence Howard, Jussie Smollett, and Bryshere Gray
Trai Byers, Taraji P. Henson, Terrence Howard, Jussie Smollett, and Bryshere Gray

The use of that offensive term, in the Cookie context, makes both dramatic sense — she's the kind of tough character who would throw around epithets just to see whether someone would challenge her — and emotional sense, because we quickly understand the two levels on which Cookie is operating. She has wisely chosen to back Jamal, played by Jussie Smollett, because he seems more talented and smarter than her other sons: eldest Andre (Trai Byers), with his MBA, his buttoned-down demeanor but little musical chops; or her youngest, Hakeem (Bryshere Y. Gray), a clever rapper with little discipline and a wild lifestyle. Cookie has a fierce mother's love for Jamal, who, out and living with his boyfriend, is in his own way as resilient as his mom. He's the one whose career she wants to manage, because she calculates that he's the true future of Empire Entertainment.

Empire, created by director Lee Daniels with a script by writer Danny Strong (who wrote Daniels's 2013 film The Butler and lives on in some minds as Jonathan in Buffy the Vampire Slayer), is no mere family drama. It has lots to say about the past and current state of the music industry. Like any such business nowadays, Luscious wants Empire Entertainment to expand into other musical genres and other mediums (TV and movies as well as pushing music "units").

There aren't many precedents for this kind of story. The pilot for Callie Khouri's Nashville cast a knowing eye on the perfidy behind the grins in country music, but has been dragged down by too many extraneous subplots and characters. Elaine Jesmer's excellent, underrated 1974 novel Number One with a Bullet remains the best fictional treatment of the black-owned record company, and Daniels and Strong may have been influenced by the real-life stories that built such companies as Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff's Philadelphia International Records and Dick Griffey's SOLAR Records. (Empire's music, executive-produced by Timbaland, hits all the right notes in matters of hip-hop, R&B, and pop.)

Related: An Open Letter to 'Nashville': Tough-Love Advice for the Country TV Series

Another good sign of Empire's sense of proportion is that it seems to know where to avoid overreach. Where Kurt Sutter strove mightily, often pretentiously, to link his motorcycle saga Sons of Anarchy to Hamlet, Empire does the right pop-culture thing of raising the possibility of a high-culture influence and then tossing it aside with a line of dialogue. ("What is this? We King Lear now?" snickers Jamal.) Neither Luscious nor Cookie needs Shakespeare as a precedent for their potentially tragic ambitions.

It's always foolish to become too enamored of a show based solely on its pilot, and heaven knows there are elements at play in Empire that could cause it to spin out of control, from possible veering over-the-top acting and plotting, to Howard's real-life image problem as someone who's faced allegations of domestic violence.

But there's so much juice in Empire — so many bristling ideas about business, family, art, race, and romance — that my anticipation for its continued artistic success is both a fervent hope and a pretty safe bet. You'd have to be crazy not to want to back this shrewd Cookie, no matter what she decides to do.

Empire premieres Wednesday, Jan. 7 at 9  p.m. on Fox.