If Lemonade exists in the Empire-verse, the Lyon family must
be wondering what the fuss is about. An R&B record that uses extremely
thinly veiled autobiographical tales of family turmoil as fodder for art?
That's pretty much every song Lucious, Jamal and Hakeem have ever made. Here in
the real world, though…well, once you've heard Beyoncé's latest, "Boom
Boom Boom Boom" sounds a whole lot less impressive. Now her cathartic
confessional album is threatening to do to this series musically what the
presidential primary already kinda did to it politically: take a show that
depends on feeling utterly of-the-moment and make it feel out of date. Like,
can a coffee-house performance of a song called "Good Enough" really
compete as a statement of personal freedom with, er,
"Freedom"?
Maybe this is an undue burden to place on "More Than
Kin," this week's Empire episode. It could just as easily have been a
comparison with fallen genius Prince, whom Jamal evokes with his live-band
presentation, high falsetto, and "am I straight or gay" sexuality,
and that wouldn't have been fair either. As fun as the music on this show has
been, it's not really meant to go toe-to-toe with the titans of pop, Timbaland
production notwithstanding. But – perhaps due to the season's two-part
structure and longer total running time than the short, surprise-hit Season One
– the story is getting a bit soft, or more than a bit. That's when you start
noticing problems you might otherwise have overlooked, or never even thought of
as a problem at all.
Take the Annika pregnancy plot (please!). "Baby mama
drama" is such a common concept that you were probably sick of hearing the
term alone ten years ago, let alone seeing it play out yet again in a
high-profile primetime soap. So far, nothing that's happened here has been
surprising enough to merit going to this tapped-dry well. Getting knocked up to
force her way into the family, assaulting a rival, having a health scare,
meddling grandparents, a jealous fiancée – we've seen it all as many times as
any maternity-ward nurse. The writing even walks into the icky idea that
stressed-out pregnant women are essentially killing their babies, as if docile
brood mares would be preferable to real human beings. (Or backstabbing creeps
in Annika's case, but you get the point.)
A similarly hoary and, frankly, sexist trope pops up in the
form of Harper, the high-powered journalist who's been working on a profile of
Lucious for the past couple of episodes. "Lady reporter sleeps with
source" is such a common plot device in movies and television you'd think
journalism school was just a form of Tinder that leaves you tens of thousands
of dollars in debt, yet it has so little basis in the real-life behavior of
women in the field that to promulgate the notion is borderline offensive. Her
behavior after Lyon cuts their liaison short is equally odd: Rather than
publish the evidence that his "late" mother is still alive – a scoop
if ever there was one, especially after he and Cookie conspired to help a
competing site post a profile of him first – she just hands the photos to Andre
in order to stir up trouble in the family. Once again, the professional takes a
back seat to the personal.
The weakness doesn't stop there. In the space of a single
episode, Laura calls off her engagement to Hakeem when she discovers he's going
to be a father, then reconsiders and puts the ring back on at Annika's bedside.
If it's that easy to resolve, why create that particular conflict in the first
place? Elsewhere, Cookie is working overtime to convince the company's recalcitrant
board of directors to name Lucious CEO once again. "So let me guess,"
Andre says to her when she approaches him with her plan, "The family needs
to present a united front." Don't they always? If a character on the show
can see it coming from far enough away to be sarcastic about it, the audience
sure as hell can, too. As for said board members' brilliant plan for the family
matriarch and patriarch to split Chief Executive Officer duties, you have to
wonder if maybe they sustained a severe brain injury on the way to the office.
That's the only way to explain an idea that transparently doomed to failure –
other than "the writers of the show wanted to gin up some cheap drama,
plausibility be damned."
But in at least one place where it counts, Empire's still
got it. Left to their own devices, the Brothers Lyon have the same funny,
breezy rapport they've always had when their parents don't have them pitted
against one another. Meeting with Hakeem following the young M.C.'s ouster as
Empire's CEO and his subsequent gentlemen's-club bender, Jamal tells him,
"You smell like stripper ass." "Stripper ass smells good,"
the younger Lyon replies. Touché! When the concerned big brother asks if Laura
really did end things for sure – "Did she actually say it's over?" –
the reply, "She slapped me at the strip club," serves as a solid
answer. Yeah, that'd do it! Eventually, all three Lyons bond by ruefully
laughing at just how bad the youngest's life is going. It's a warm, believable
moment, and it shows just how good actors Jussie Smollett, Bryshere Gray and
Trai Byers are at playing a family that's seen each other at their worst but
still feels a deep connection to one another, no matter the bullshit. That's
the kind of energy Empire needs right now: more connection, less bullshit.
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