'Empire' rides high as it heads to finale
Empire is as platinum as breakout television gets.
Wednesday (8 p.m. ET/PT), Fox's midseason juggernaut is taking a triumphant bow in a two-hour finale. The show, a Dynasty set in today's hip-hop scene, stars Terrence Howard as a label boss and Taraji P. Henson as his recently sprung-from-jail ex-wife.
Empire has broken Nielsen records as the first series since at least 1991 to build its audience in every episode. It's this season's No. 1 network drama among young adults, and has surpassed The Walking Dead and Scandal on Twitter. And the soapy, music-filled drama is giving the industry a gut-check in diversity: More than 60% of its audience is African-American.
Watching the show's audience grow, "we're, like, addicted," Henson says. "Now we're like brats — we're expecting the numbers to grow every week."
It's startling to consider how far the show has come since its debut 10 weeks ago. Henson, a character actor in films who spent two years on the CBS drama Person of Interest, is now a trending cultural phenom as Cookie Lyon, a queen of one-liners reclaiming her spot in the music biz while reconnecting with her three sons after spending 17 years behind bars.
Now, even at the grocery store, "I just don't get called my name anymore; I'm Cookie," Henson says.
Howard is Empire's ill honcho, choosing among the Lyon sons vying to take over the business: Savvy but bipolar Andre (Trai Byers); gay R&B phenom Jamal (Jussie Smollett); and blinged-out rapper-on-the-rise Hakeem (Bryshere Gray). On set, Henson and Howard "set the tone for us," Gray says.
Meanwhile,a soundtrack, produced by Timbaland, managed to overcome Madonna in the race for this week's No. 1 album, a 2016 Empire summer tour is in the works, and buyers have begun jostling for international rights to the show.
Co-creator Lee Daniels is no longer leaning on his personal Rolodex to book guest stars (he persuaded Courtney Love to play a strung-out, has-been singer this season). "We totally get artists approaching us who wouldn't have approached us eight weeks ago," says executive producer Brian Grazer.
But Empire's greatest feat might just be giving the fourth-place Fox network some street cred.
"There's only one way to rebuild a network, and it's slowly, it's a show at a time," says Fox Television Group co-chairman Gary Newman. After finding footing with Gotham this fall, he and co-chairman Dana Walden put a giant marketing budget behind Empire. Then word of mouth took over.
The network is now shopping for companion shows for Empire's fall run. "It will really be an anchor of our schedule next year," Newman says.
The temptation, as always, is to produce a season-long 22 hours, up from 12 for the current run, but Daniels has voiced concern.
"We know that (producers) have anxiety about trying to sustain the intensity of Season 2 over 22 (episodes)," Newman says. "We're going to really try not to be too greedy about it. We want to sustain a long-term asset here."
Guest stars Wednesday include Snoop Dogg,
Rita Ora and Patti LaBelle, and in one scene, "Jamal and Lucious come together through song, and it's one of the most spectacular things you will ever see," Smollett says.
Strong calls it "an extremely explosive finale." As for Season 2, "we just need to stick to our guns and do more of the spirit of what got us here in the first place," he says, "rather than trying to stress out over expectations."
Contributing: Bill Keveney