For a guy who's from the hood, I've done a lot of un-hood shit in my time: gone to see musicals, taken a cooking class, even gotten a mani-pedi. (Okay, that mani-pedi was the bomb, I don't care what anyone says!) Usually, whenever I did stuff like this, there was a girl involved. (What - you thought I just busted up into a spa on my own and asked them if they could squeeze me in for a facial?)
Most fellas out there will understand what I'm talking about - you end up doing a lot of crap that's contrary to your nature simply because your girlfriend's into it. It's kind of like that scene in Pulp Fiction, where Samuel L. Jackson's character says that his old lady's a vegetarian, which essentially means that he's one, too.
Anyway, one of the many un-hood things I did back in the day because of girls was watch soap operas. Yes, the Days of Our Lives, General Hospital, Erica Kane-is-getting-married-again? type soaps. One thing I could always count on with those were absurd plots, over-the-top characters, and just plain-ole batshit antics across the board.
And what does all this have to do with Empire? In my opinion, Empire - in just its sophomore season - has morphed into a nighttime soap.
First of all, let me say that I've been a fan of Empire since it premiered earlier this year on Fox, and no one was happier than I was to see it turn into a ratings juggernaut. The show was a rare combination of intricate storytelling and compelling characters that merged into an irresistible drama. Now it's turning into a throwback to the 1980's, even to the extent of copying the star-of-the-week formula, a la The Love Boat (eg, Chris Rock, Ludacris, etc.).
So what's gone wrong? How did a show with so much going for it suddenly start to nosedive? And nosedive it has, with ratings - although still strong - steadily decreasing week after week. (Oddly enough, I knew just on gut instinct that the numbers had to be down because each episode of the show seemed less enjoyable than the last. It was only when I actually did a little research today that I found my suspicions confirmed.) Personally, I think there are couple areas we can point to, but let's start with the characters, who have become deeply flawed, conceptually, in my opinion.
Take Andre, for instance. He has supposedly found his faith, but spends the first couple of episodes begging Lucious to let him come back in out of the rain. To me, that's in direct contradiction of a man who's found GOD. If he truly has the Almighty in his life, then he doesn't need Lucious. I think it would have been more in keeping with his newfound faith (and provided a better storyline) if he had simply walked away after Lucious stiff-armed him. Then, it could have been Lucious running to Andre and begging him to come back after realizing that only his eldest son has the know-how, savvy and connections to run Empire from a financial perspective.
On a side note, I have to admit I like Andre's wife; she is straight up ride-or-die. To be honest, though, when the show premiered and they revealed that Andre was bipolar, I wasn't sure if she was real (or just a figment of his imagination) for the first couple of episodes because initially they didn't show her interacting with anyone other than him. Right now she's being used merely as a plot device for the Anika storyline, but hopefully that will change soon because I could easily see them writing her out of the show.
Speaking of Anika, this is another character that they've done weird things with. In the first season she was confident and smart - a woman strong enough to (a) go toe-to-toe with Cookie (although that raises the question of how smart she is after all), and (b) walk away from Lucious when she realized he was a scoundrel. She was also a competent A&R exec with her own stable of artists that she had developed. Now she's seemingly gone batshit crazy - over Hakeem, no less (who's really an immature punk, if we're being honest) - and has seemingly lost everything. My impression from Season 1 was that she could have taken her artists and gone to just about any record label out there. It's hard to reconcile that earlier character with this woman who's now putting on blond wigs, pretending to be a chauffeur, and doing a bunch of other crap that is inconsistent with the Anika the show originally presented.
Next, the storyline has dipped from absurd into the plain stupid. I mean, would you really place the badly-decomposed body of a murdered man into the car of a federal prosecutor (especially one looking to send you up the river)? That's just another crime that they'll eventually try to pin on Lucious, because there's no way an autopsy is going to say Vernon died of natural causes. And Cookie in a gorilla suit? What the hell was that about? I could go on, but why bother? It's just depressing as hell...
More to the point, there's no central theme with respect to the plot. In the first season, it was all about Lucious' illness and the need to pick a successor; just about everything circled around that motif. Now, there's nothing; the show just seems to be randomly drifting along, staggering around aimlessly like a zombie from The Walking Dead.
The are other issues that could be singled out for discussion, but this is enough for now. All in all, while the show is still doing well enough in the ratings to survive, it has clearly made several missteps in a very short period of time, all of which begs the question: has the show jumped the shark already? I could point to a dozen things - several of which have already been mentioned - that could be construed as jumping the shark: the gorilla suit gag; planting Vernon's body in the prosecutor's car; Anika playing dress-up. It's just sad that the show, with so much potential and such tremendous talent (both in front of and behind the camera) has seemingly lost its way this early in its life cycle. Hopefully someone will find a way to right the ship soon, before they crash into the rocks.
