'Empire' Holds Up a Funhouse Mirror to Our Frenetic Reality

Empire is a lot of things. Melodramatic. Addictive. Moving. Stylish. Exceedingly well-viewed. But by no means is it subtle. For proof of this, look no further than the first scene of the first episode of the show's second season, in which Cookie Lyon (Taraji P. Henson) is lowered onto a concert stage in a cage while wearing a gorilla suit. She beats her chest, removing the gorilla mask to give a brief, impassioned speech to the crowd, protesting the mass incarceration of black men in America.

The concert—marketed as a "rally"—is meant to benefit her husband, Lucious Lyon (Terrence Howard), who's been imprisoned for the murder of a guy named Bunkie, who just so happens to be Cookie's cousin. Lucious is guilty as hell, and Cookie and the rest of Lucious's family know he did it and hate him for it: two of his sons, Andre and Hakeem, are the ones who snitched on him as revenge for handing the company to his middle son, Jamal. But Empire, the family's record label, is larger than whatever conflicts they might have. It's the biggest hip-hop company around, and if it continues to thrive, whatever heinous crimes the Lyons might have committed to perpetuate it will be worth it. More than anything, the concert is an opportunity to impress a white, lesbian investor played by Marissa Tomei, who can potentially help Cookie, Hakeem, and Andre wrest control of Empire from Lucious and Jamal once and for all.

If this sounds a bit confusing, it's only because Empire's bombastic storyline is a reflection of our own over-the-top society. When Jamal tells Cookie backstage that Bill Clinton is in the crowd and she responds, "He better be if he wants his wife to win," it's a timely moment that mirrors our social and political landscape, one in which Clinton actively (if clumsily) courts black voters by doing the "nae nae" on the The Ellen DeGeneres Show, and Donald Trump insults a notable Latino journalist only to see his ratings go up.

Matters of social justice, race, and discussions around gender have become tweetable. Bernie Sanders was interrupted by activists claiming to represent Black Lives Matter one day; within a week he rolled out an extensive racism and racial justice platform on his website. Texas teenager Ahmed Mohamed came to school, excited to show his teachers a homemade clock, only to be labeled a terrorist. Within a day, the public had rallied behind him, and now he's being invited to visit MIT. Same with the internet's reaction to the Minnesota dentist who shot Zimbabwean national icon Cecil the Lion, and the white Indiana poet who used a Chinese pen name to get a previously rejected poem published. These quick shifts in personal politics and public opinion are ones that inform Empire's dramatic style. Characters and themes swerve and transform abruptly, just like our news cycle.

Empire's pacing is fast and frenetic. New characters and story arcs are packed in tightly, exploding in front of us, only to disappear an episode later. Last season, Cookie was involved in the murder of a rival drug dealer, but the event seemed to get lost in the din of the show, only to surge into relevance in season two. A friend of mine worried that the show might "burn out" of storylines before its third season. But I'm not sure the show is concerned with burnout, as it ignites a storm of memes, hashtags, and tweets during and after each episode. One of last season's most notable moments was a scene in which Cookie smacked her ass, saying, "This is an ass," after being turned down by Lucious at a dinner. That GIF went viral, racking up thousands of retweets, Instagram shares, and Tumblr notes, and was shared and reposted by men, women, mothers, teens, and grandmothers alike. Cookie became her own conversation. My own mother even called me to talk about the ass-smacking.

Cookie, and the show's writers, also don't care much about respectability politics, especially when related to black characters. Cookie's assistant mistakenly calls Ferguson "Peterson" when talking to Don Lemon, while Jamal is annoyed by a flamboyant, gay singer who shows up to his office and performs on his desk. In true Empire style, the existence of stereotype is acknowledged, but also complicated. In one scene, Cookie argues loudly over the phone in a cab; when the dark-skinned Indian driver shakes his head in disapproval, she asks, "What are you shaking your head for? You're black, too!" It's a sobering piece of dialogue that allows Cookie a level of depth and agency to thwart the labels placed on her, and on the show.

At times, though, I wonder if the show is inviting humor that it is unaware of, at the cost of the larger issues it attempts to address. Chris Rock as Frank Gathers, a high-profile drug dealer whom Lucious reunites with in jail, seems like an off-brand casting choice aimed more for name recognition. In another episode, a corrupt prison guard played by Ludacris puts Lucious in solitary confinement, warning him that he could kill him in jail and no one would ever know what happened. Whether intentional or not, there was an eerie connection made to Sandra Bland, but the fact that it was Ludacris and Terrence Howard facing off through a small slat in the cell makes the moment feel unearned in light of the real-life tragedy the scene echoes.

And so, we come back to the "Free Lucious" rally against mass incarceration, a complicated moment in a show whose bread-and-butter is doing too much. Cookie passes up talking to Don Lemon, who is seen as fake, to chat with Al Sharpton, who is seen as authentic. Jamal, Swizz Beatz, and another rapper perform a song about freedom, while the crowd holds up signs with Lucious's face plastered on it. It's a clever cooptation of the current moment, one that may feel more "real" than the barrage of presidential hopefuls slinging insults and half-hearted truths and a county clerk hailed as a hero for blocking gay couples from being married, while a black teen is tackled by a police officer for jaywalking. We may, in fact, be living in what feels like a show, something stranger than reality. Empire is just a heightened version of that.

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Empire airs on Wednesdays at 9 PM on Fox.