There’s enough story presented in Wednesday’s first episode of “Empire,” the new Fox melodrama about a New York City family feuding over control of its record label, to sustain several TV seasons.
A long run would be a good thing for the show’s creators, Oscar-nominated director Lee Daniels and Danny Strong, screenwriter of “Lee Daniels’ The Butler,” and for Chicago, which is not the series’ setting but does play host to the shooting of “Empire” in the Cinespace Chicago Film Studios on the Southwest Side.
There’s certainly potential in this show: Daniels’ track record of telling stories audiences respond to (he also made “Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire”); a strong, almost all African-American cast addressing some contemporary issues; support from Fox, which has ordered 13 episodes; highly engaging music supervised by the producer Timbaland.
But at least at the outset, there’s more than just a lot of potential. There’s a lot of everything. Daniels is finally working with a streamlined title, but he’s overstuffed the show, jamming the first 40-some minutes with story elements familiar from Shakespeare, “The Godfather,” and 1990s gangsta movies.
Parental beatdowns! Sibling rivalry! Drug money! Terminal illness! Blackmail! Betrayal! Gold chains! It’s all so much, so soon.
“Empire” seems mostly to want to be a big old nighttime soap opera, in the manner of “Dallas” or “Dynasty,” and Daniels has even said he hopes viewers will find some humor in it. But unless his show decides to settle down and take a couple of breaths, it’s hard to know for sure what this series is going to feel like.
It presents Lucious Lyon (Terrence Howard, Oscar nominated for “Hustle & Flow”) as the head of Empire Entertainment, a big label that is about to go public. (This is, apparently, a world in which Wall Street loves a business model in rapid decline.) Lucious is a one-time street hustler turned star musical performer turned star businessman and producer.
His visits to a doctor have him thinking about legacy, not unlike the Chicago mayor Kelsey Grammer played in a recent, shot-in-Chicago series, “Boss.” So the head of the family calls his three adult sons together and says they’ll be in competition to take control of the company.
“What is this? Are we ‘King Lear’ now?” asks one of them, the writing, playing and singing prodigy Jamal (Jussie Smollett), whose father refuses to see his musical talent because, as Lucious steps back a few decades to phrase it, “Your sexuality, that’s a choice, son. You can choose to sleep with women if you want.”
The most obvious candidate is Andre (Trai Byers), a square-jawed business school graduate who is the company’s CFO but lacks the star cachet Lucious seems to want in a successor. The father’s hopes rest with Hakeem (Bryshere Gray), a talented rapper into the lifestyle as much as the music.
All of that is simmering. And then the boys’ mother, Lucious’ ex-wife (Taraji P. Henson, Oscar-nominated for “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”), gets out of jail after, wouldn’t you know, taking a 17-year drug fall for Lucious.
Some prisoners learn the law while behind bars; Cookie Lyon seems to have spent her days studying to become a reality-show villain.
“Cookie’s coming home!” she announces.
“I’m here to get what’s mine!”
“You’re not sweeping me under the carpet, Lucious!”
As she is busy strutting into boardrooms and living rooms in order to do more sloganeering, her family members keep apologizing for not visiting her in jail.
Henson plays Cookie with gusto. She would be more entertaining, though, if her behavior, and her relatives’ reactions to her, weren’t so all over the map. Jamal sees her as a loving mom and potential manager of his career, Hakeem as a “psychotic animal.” Cookie, under her breath, calls Jamal a “sissy.”
Howard, too, seems to struggle to find purchase on his character in his series of choppy scenes. Lucious is on a first-name basis with “Barack,” with a pistol and with, we can assume, the hairstylist he keeps visiting for his ever-changing ‘do.
Better defined, and more immediately affecting, is the strong relationship between the two musical brothers, who will be pitted against one another even as they seem to be best working as a team.
They are so good, in fact, that one supposedly impromptu jam session of theirs is heard by viewers as a fully produced song, with vocal effects and all. This is a pet peeve: TV shows like this are trying to sell us songs, of course, but such artificiality is like a record needle scratching across the storyline.
The episode looks glossy, yes, with the high shine of new money and the flashy things it can buy. But it’s also glossy in the sense that it offers little more than a gloss on every topic it touches before moving on to the next thing.
A lot of that may stem from the pressure of making a pilot. More than just being the first episode to air, remember, a pilot is used to sell a show, and subtlety is not one of the qualities to which networks respond. (In September, the show began filming the subsequent episodes here, and cast and crew are scheduled to work into February, according to the Chicago Film Office.)
As things progress, “Empire” might be able to follow the model of ABC’s “Nashville,” a moderately campy, high-dramatic-tension, very watchable soap opera set in the music business. But the newer show will need to start taking the care “Nashville” has shown in establishing characters, setting up events and letting the storytelling flow.
At the outset, watching this series about the people behind the music is like letting your teenager control the car stereo. Just when you start getting into one song, the kid gets impatient and another one, sometimes in a completely different genre, starts up.
‘Empire’
8 p.m. Wednesday, Fox
Twitter @StevenKJohnson
