Why Black People Love "Empire"

by J. Brown

A month and a half after its premiere episode, Empire has skyrocketed into the biggest new drama on TV that isn’t produced by Shonda Rhimes. According to this report by Entertainment Weekly, Empire’s ratings have increased every week and are reaching Walking Dead numbers.  I don’t know how TV ratings are calculated, but I always measure ratings based on how annoying people on Twitter and Facebook become when the show is airing. Based on these systems, the numbers seem to match. This is all pretty unprecedented, and every report that I’ve read suggests that there weren’t any lofty expectations for the program. To me, it seemed very much like a cheap attempt to attract Black viewers. “Let’s give them hacky hip-hop music and put Terrence Howard in it. He’s in all the Negro films, they must love that guy.” Surprisingly (or maybe not), this has worked out probably better than even FOX had imagined. How did they pull this off?

First of all, Black people do actually love bad rap music. Maybe “love” isn’t the right word, but we certainly have an affinity for music that is simple, uncomplicated, and easy to make memes from. To further understand the preceding sentence, take into account that “CoCo” by OT Genasis has 93.4 million views on YouTube. Surely, no one really thinks this song is good, but it lives in that interesting space between talentless and funny that Black people just can’t get enough of. To be clear, a healthy portion of those YouTube views probably came from white people who may or may not have been directly laughing at Mr. Genasis, but I’m willing to bet those same Caucasoids played a large part in Empire’s success, as well. When Empire airs episodes with songs like “Drip Drop” as a prominent part of the plot line, I’m convinced that they are appealing to what I like to call the Ironically Cool Connection. The ICC occurs when something that would usually be seen as lame gets embraced due to its originality and unintentional comedy. Because it’s so bad, people pretend to like it in order to be ironic. But there’s a slippery slope here; if enough people pretend to be ironic, eventually some of them will actually start liking it. It’s the thin line between laughing at something and finding strange pleasure in the simplicity of it all. We’ve seen this happen with words like “swag”, “thot” and “fleek”. We’ve seen it with songs like “CoCo” and “U Guessed It”. Now, we’re seeing it with Empire and the trite musical styling of Hakeem Lyon, who for all intents and purposes is the fictionalized version of Tyga.

Also, let's not dismiss the importance of Taraji P. Henson and Terrence Howard in Empire’s newfound success. In real life, these two are probably B-list celebrities at best, but to Black Hollywood they’re like our version of Matt Damon and Sandra Bullock. There’s also a subtle, reminiscent attraction to seeing them all but reprise their roles from “Hustle & Flow”, a movie so musically relevant that it helped Three 6 Mafia win an Oscar. If we’re being honest, Empire is like the weekly version of that movie, except it’s 20 years later and now their characters have three kids. There’s something endearing about watching Terrence wear elegant silk ascots while talking in his trademark trembling voice that sounds like he’s right on the cusp of tears. Not to mention, in a real show of artistic versatility, he transitioned from playing a pimp to a gangster/record executive.

This brings me to my next point, which is that Black people love watching shows with clear, negative racial stereotypes. I’m not sure if this is because we don’t like shows like 24 where Black people play Presidents, or because the only shows starring Black people as the main characters are the ones that feature obvious stereotypes. Either way, we soak this stuff up. Not to mention, Black actors are often rewarded for perpetualizing these stereotypes, so they must be perfect for these roles, right? (Hi, Lupita. What’s up, Denzel? I see you, Mo’Nique.) It wasn’t enough to have a Black-on-Black murder in the first episode, as well as a shameless onslaught of rap and R&B music throughout each and every episode. They went even further by casting Taraji P. Henson as the loudmouth hoodrat. To be fair, she went above and beyond to prove her ability to flex that hoodrat acting muscle in Baby Boy, which by all accounts is a ghetto classic. Considering the popularity of reality shows like Love & Hip-Hop, Real Housewives, and Basketball Wives, FOX was very aware of our culture’s love for the loudmouth hoodrat. Maybe this is their way of making us feel like we're sufficiently represented on television. The gangster, the hoodrat and the barrage of hip-hop weren’t enough, though. We needed some drama. That’s why they gave us the Jamal character, a gay singer with a Latin live-in lover. Black people hate gays, and we hate interracial dating, so this was sure to stir up some controversy. Just in case the audience had any doubt about the Black community’s homophobia, his mother calls him a faggot and his father puts him in a trash bin in the pilot episode. Ooh, girl.

But above all, what’s the real reason we love Empire? The same reason we love most of the nonsense we watch on TV: it gives us messy people to laugh at. What could possibly be more entertaining than that?