Empire, season 1 episode 2, review: Much needed sense of humour counters the bombast

After last week’s steroid enhanced, in-yer-face opener I approached the second episode of Fox’s new smash hit series with some trepidation. Happily, despite its attention seeking entrance, Empire is showing signs of settling down into something with more brains than its good looking yet vacuous series opener suggested.

Don’t get me wrong, it still looks and feels like the kind of soap opera you’d find playing in the background of a Grand Theft Auto game, but the bombast has been joined by a much needed sense of humour, something this show desperately needs to avoid looking absurdly po-faced. Excellent gags involving a furious Barack Obama hanging up on hip hop mogul Lucious Lyon (Terrence Howard) and young rappers not knowing who Diana Ross is helped offset the subtle-as-a-sledgehammer plotlines.

Lucious, secretly dying of Motor Neurone Disease, had his attention diverted from legacies and inheritance by a scandal involving a fatal shooting and the violent lyrics of one of his stars, Kid FoFo. Despite being coached on how to talk on ‘white television’, Lucious ended up veering marvellously off-message in the face of his Republican interviewer’s relentless smarm and delivered an impassioned defence of rap and hip hop. When his son Hakeem called Obama a ‘sell out’, he may as well have been talking about his rapper-turned-CEO father. However, living on borrowed time, Lucious’ claws are coming back out.

Brothers Hakeem (Bryshere Y. Gray) and Jamal (Jussie Smollet) were thrown head to head by their warring parents, as mother Cookie (Taraji P. Henson) demanded that ‘her boy’ Jamal opened Lucious’ nightclub, Leviticus, alongside Hakeem. However Lucious doesn’t want his gay son associated with his club and, in fact, has now threatened to cut Jamal off entirely if he comes out. The two young musicians are still tight, despite Cookie and Lucious’ politics, and brought the house down performing together. It’s going to be genuinely heart-breaking when they’re inevitably turned against each other.

It’s their older brother Andre (Trai Byers) who’s really interested in following his father’s footsteps as CEO of Empire and king of meddling. However, despite his Machiavellian scheming working a treat at the moment, bipolar Andre has begun talking about himself in the third person and has stopped taking his pills. In the space of a couple of scenes Lucious promised Empire to both Andre and Hakeem, so he’ll only have himself to blame when the brothers tear themselves apart.

There’s something rather ‘throwing the kitchen sink’ about Empire’s plotlines. Jamal’s homosexuality, Andre’s bipolar disorder, Cookie informing for the FBI, Lucious’ Motor Neurone Disease, and so on. One imagines the broth will only get thicker and thicker as the series progresses. However, as long as Empire can retain its sense of humour and not take itself too seriously, I could start to see why America went crazy for this show after all.