'Star' Is Like 'Empire' but Not as Much Fun

Technically, Star isn't an Empire spinoff, but it certainly functions like one. Both are contemporary musical-soap dramas created by Lee Daniels—who's previously stated that there'll be crossover episodes, ensuring that both take place within the same universe—and they both follow dysfunctional families and fame-thirsty musicians, with plenty of musical interludes to spare.

The existence of Star makes sense, in theory: FOX (and Daniels) are chasing after the runaway success of Empire while attempting to keep the musical-drama genre relevant. Star also wants to switch the focus from the dramatic inner workings of the music industry to the dramatic interpersonal issues of the musicians fighting to make it (although the boys of Empire have already made it, thanks to familial connections). It wants to swap the gender focus, too, as Star follows the early formations of an all-girl R&B group.

But while Empire quickly found its footing by leaning into soap opera rules and cleverly choosing when to deploy twisty shockers (as well as including the endlessly captivating Cookie Lyon, played perfectly by the charismatic Taraji P. Henson), Star doesn't even try to establish itself before throwing everything it can at the wall. Its title character (Jude Demorest) is "a thief, a habitual liar" who has gone through numerous foster families and has two goals: to find her younger sister Simone (Brittany O'Grady) who's also in foster care, and to become famous by teaming up with Alex (Ryan Destiny), a wealthy girl that she met on Instagram.

The pilot episode zips through plot points: Star gets out of the foster home and reunites with her sister; Alex is keeping her famous father (played by Lenny Kravitz) a secret; all three girls make it to Atlanta and work at a salon for Star's godmother Carlotta (Queen Latifah); they find a cokehead manager, Jahil Rivera (Benjamin Bratt) at a strip club. Plus, there's addiction, a big family secret, sexual assault, murder, and a huge twist we all saw coming.

We're given no reason to care about these characters, but Star requires that we attach to them immediately. The next two episodes don't fare much better, throwing in romantic storylines before we have time to learn the suitors' names and touching on everything from sex trafficking to suicide attempts.

But the biggest issue with Star is that its three leads simply aren't compelling enough. The actresses can sing and dance, but their characters are so woefully underwritten that they mostly just stomp through the show—furrowing their brows, flipping their hair, and angrily eating lollipops. It's a shame, because there's definite potential here—in Simone especially, who's a survivor, an addict, a mixed-race teenager, and the most reluctant to even be in the group. But Star can't quite seem to properly follow its most interesting threads, such as Coretta's conflict with her transgender daughter; mostly, they're cut short with shrugs.

There are a few highlights: Queen Latifah and Benjamin Bratt put in wonderful work as, respectively, the girls' pseudo-mother and selfishly enthusiastic manager; the music is catchy even when it's also forgettable (and isn't Empire's, too?); and the series often pushes the musical sequences into fantastic and surrealistic territory. In the third episode, "Next of Kin," a recording session is briefly turned into a hospital dance party-cum-kiss-off. But when the show returns back to the real world, the viewers' interest fades away.

Still, Star brings up a larger conversation about musical dramas and their current place on television, especially when it comes to addressing the desires of fame. FOX's Glee rose up and then burnt out quickly, singing in circles while throwing in exploitative plot points (such as the show's horrendous school-shooting episode.) Glee is perhaps closer to Star than even Empire is, as its strongest, earlier episodes focused on the sad desperation of bullied high school students who used their talent to get out of their current life situations.

But Glee soon became a parody of itself, eschewing strong character connections in favor of guest stars and tired stunts. Empire has been falling this season, too, losing its already-loose grip on reality while slowly burying itself with excessive drama that it increasingly will struggle to dig its way out of. Over the summer, there was Netflix's The Get Down, a six-episode half-season of a show that was more known for its production costs than, well, anything else. Its 93-minute, Baz Luhrmann–directed pilot episode was a slog, and the show kept up a snail's pace until finally getting good in the last episode—if audiences even made it that far. The CW's Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is in a category of its own, concerned more with relationships and mental illness than with fame-chasing, a more down-to-earth approach even when it zips into musical flights of fancy.

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend has the benefit of constant critical adoration and a network that believes in it, even if it doesn't exactly have the ratings. The latter, though, is the one thing Star might actually have going for itself: FOX smartly paired it up with Empire—whose ratings increase became a story of its own during the first season—premiering it directly after the fall finale tonight, aiming to catch viewers looking for an easy replacement while Empire is on hiatus. But it's likely those viewers will fall off, too, if Star doesn't slow down enough to give its characters more than one dimension.

Follow Pilot Viruet on Twitter.