It’s hard to imagine a more complicated romantic history than the one Lucious and Cookie share - incarceration-based sacrifices! Pillow stranglings! The presence of Boo Boo Kitty! - and you can feel both that history and the fire that remains in their conversation. I love this one because it’s pretty simple: it’s a showcase for Howard and Henson’s sparkling, convincing chemistry. Whether they’re featured or not, they’re all included in the chart below. I’m not going to dissect every scene in detail, but I’ve picked out a few notable ones for in-depth discussion. Cookie hijacking the stage at Leviticus in the middle of Jamal’s performance with Pitbull so Hakeem can drop a snarling diss track? That’s more like a 9! Cookie skewering Anika with a razor-sharp quip? That’s about a 1. Allow me to introduce you to the Disbelief Suspension Index, or DSI: it’s a semi-quantitative, scene-by-scene (internal) calculation that’ll tell you just how hard you have to work to believe what’s happening right before your eyes on Empire. It’s a tragedy that the world doesn’t widely recognize Empire as the fantasy it is, but it’s one that we can begin to correct in this space through the magic of impulsive pseudo-science. Who needs the Lannisters when you’ve got the Lyons? Henson’s Cookie, destroyer of worlds and devourer of screen time. Kelly in terms of apparent musical skill you have to believe in the sheer existence of Taraji P. To get every bit of juice out of the show, you have to believe Anika would hop from a father’s bed to his son’s without batting an eye for the sake of power you have to believe in the supposed musical genius of Terrence Howard’s Lucious, a man who lives somewhere between Jay Z and R.
It doesn’t have magic or dragons, sure, but it requires the same thing to reach full flight as a viewing experience: the suspension of disbelief. It’s also TV’s most popular fantasy series, albeit one that hides in plain sight next to rivals like Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead. We welcome your additional reflections in the comments.Įmpire is more than just a pulpy music industry send-up or an oft-piercing family study. This is not a recap series we are merely drawing inspiration from each subsequent episode. Every week we will publish a new writing, study, or reflection on this, the best of all possible shows. The Post-Empire Literary Society is a group of Verge writers devoted to the excavation, appreciation, and analysis of the Fox television show Empire.
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