Fox’s new series has broken ratings records — and it’s also broken ground in terms of its portrayal of race, queerness, and women on television. But that doesn’t mean it’s perfect, as BuzzFeed Entertainment Senior Editor Kelley Carter, BuzzFeed LGBT Editor Saeed Jones, and BuzzFeed Staff Writer Ira Madison III discuss.
Cookie Lyon (Taraji P. Henson) and Lucious Lyon (Terrence Howard) on Empire.
Chuck Hodes / Via Fox
Ira Madison III: I've really enjoyed the different shades of blackness that we've seen on television this year thus far, and Empire has contributed to that. The Lyons are completely different from the family on Black-ish, or Gabrielle Union on Being Mary Jane, etc. After all, this is the first time we've gotten to see a glossy soap with black people in it (aside from the sorely missed Generations), and white versions of this show have existed for decades. Prestige dramas on cable are great, but for something this great to be on network television is much more important, I think, since it's "for everyone" and less niche. By putting a new type of representation of blackness on television in American homes every Wednesday night in primetime, the landscape of television will surely have to change. It's not just some HBO show. It's a high-rated network television show that mainstream America is watching in increasing numbers each week. But, for all the good that's come from and will hopefully continue to come from Empire, I've also seen some typical colorism creeping in. Anika (Grace Gealey), for instance, really just turned out to be a Tyler Perry archetype of the scheming light-skinned woman.
Kelley L. Carter: I'm very sensitive to images of light-skinned versus dark-skinned portrayals in television and film, and when I heard someone mention that in regard to Empire, it threw me back a bit. I get it. Anika is this light-skinned woman who comes from an upper-class upbringing, and therefore, she's evil! That said, what I've largely noticed in Tyler Perry pieces is that it's not just the light-skinned women who are evil — it's black women generally speaking who want to escape economic strife or black women who haven't experienced being downtrodden and are awful to those in less-than-ideal situations. In Perry's movies, the latter set of women usually have something horrible happen to them or it's clear that they're evildoers who get something (like an STD) they can never come back from. And I just don't feel that Empire reinforces that narrative in the same way. That said, it does stand out that the dark-skinned people in the TV series are the worker bees; I'm not sure how I feel about that just yet, though?
Saeed Jones: Something I've been thinking about regarding colorism on Empire is how whiteness is perceived by the many of the Lyons as evil. Lucious (Terrence Howard) cited Andre (Trai Byers) marrying Rhonda (Kaitlin Doubleday), a white woman, as one of the reasons he knew he couldn't really trust his son. "I knew the moment you brought her into my house," he says. Her very inclusion in the family is perceived as a betrayal. I bring this up because I wonder if it connects to how colorism functions on the show. Despite the show's contemporary setting, Anika's character is surprisingly retrograde: She is the "evil mulatto" who can't be trusted because her identity itself — her father is white, her mother is black — is constructed as a racial betrayal. Her final betrayal is when she literally leaves Lucious to work with a white man — Lucious' longtime rival Billy Baretti (Judd Nelson).
Lucious and his second wife Anika (Grace Gealy)
Fox
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