Ham - Empire: the unauthorized untold story

Empire co-creator Lee Daniels flanked by Terrence Howard and Taraji P. Henson

F or the past decade or so, network television has been in a rut filled with procedural crime dramas, stale three-camera sitcoms, and warmed-over reality shows that are great if you are white and older than fifty (especially if you are a man). Everybody else has been turning to cable networks like AMC and HBO and their prestige dramas, or binge-watching each new offering from streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon Prime. The big five TV networks were missing out on a huge, young, diverse audience, and they needed to find a way to tap into it.

Of course, its not as if Lee Daniels and Danny Strong were deliberately thinking along those lines when they cooked up Empire . All they wanted to do was bring back the seamy thrills of classic 1980s prime-time soaps like Dynasty and Falcon Crest, but set their story in the modern music world.

As an actor, Danny Strong broke into the industry with a recurring role in the series Saved by the Bell: The New Class, and continued to snap up bit parts in films and TV shows for the next decade. His most notable roles came thanks to big story arcs in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (as one of a trio of gents trying to stir up magical trouble in Sunnydale) and Gilmore Girls (playing Doyle, the Yale Daily News editor and on-again, off-again love interest of the tightly wound Paris). Later, he had a memorable role as one of the creatives working for Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce on Mad Men . All that time, though, he was putting together an impressive rsum of work behind the camera as a screenwriter and producer, including an Emmy for his work on Game Change , the HBO film about John McCain and Sarah Palins failed presidential campaign, and a Writers Guild Award for Recount , another cable movie about the controversial and chaotic presidential election of 2000.

The initial idea for Empire came to him, he recalled in an interview for the podcast The Business , as he was driving around Los Angeles one day. I heard a news story about Puffy, and I just thought, Hip-hop is so cool. Thats what I should do next, something in hip-hop. From there, his imagination took a historical turn, to the royal intrigues of plays like Shakespeares King Lear and James Goldmans The Lion in Winter . Could he take the dramatic family conflicts of those stories, which pit husbands against wives and sons and daughters against their parents, and transplant them to the contemporary world of hip-hop?

To help him turn this stray idea into a reality, Strong called his friend Lee Daniels, with whom hed recently worked as the screenwriter for The Butler , the hit historical drama starring Forest Whitaker and Oprah Winfrey. Daniels was enjoying a career high after living through the kind of pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps story that inspires hundreds of people every year to move to Los Angeles in hopes of making a splash in the entertainment industry. Instead of going to film school, the former Philadelphia native had worked his way up the ranks as a manager and a casting director; one of his first big breaks was working with Prince to find actors for music videos and the film Under the Cherry Moon . Eventually, he moved up to producing feature films, including the award-winning dramas Monster s Ball and The Woodsman . Although his directorial debut, Shadowboxer , didnt make a big splash, his next projectan adaptation of Sapphires novel Push retitled Precious won awards at Sundance and Cannes and earned him a Best Director nomination at the Academy Awards. (The films young lead, Gabourey Sidibe, was also nominated for Best Actress, and her costar MoNique took home the award for Best Supporting Actress.)

After a small critical and commercial setback with the 2012 release of his adaptation of the novel The Paperboy , Daniels returned in a big way with The Butler . Though it didnt earn the accolades that Precious did, the film earned more than $150 million and nabbed several nominations for Screen Actors Guild and Critics Choice Awards. And he felt an immediate kinship with Danny Strong from the moment they began working together. I think we are kindred spirits artistically, Strong told Out magazine. Were kind of polar opposites in personalities but I think creatively we are kindred spirits. We both like our stories to be entertaining and bombastic but also important and with depth. Neither of us are afraid to go there.

Empire co-creator Danny Strong

When Strong approached Daniels with the kernel of an idea for Empire , the screenwriter was initially thinking that it would be another film project for them to work on. Still smarting from the hurdles hed had to go through to get The Butler off the ground, and wanting to earn a little extra cash this time around, the director suggested they turn this project into a TV series that recreated the dramatic beats of prime-time soaps like Dynasty and Knots Landing .

When they had finished writing the pilot episode, though, Daniels and Strong were unsure whether America was really ready for a show like this. I felt very similarly to when I walked away from Precious , Daniels told the Los Angeles Times . I felt naked; I felt vulnerable. I felt I didnt know if I want white America seeing this; I didnt know if I want black America exposed like this. It was an uncomfortable feeling.

Even with his concerns, Daniels and Strong still had a lot of heat in the industry thanks to the success of The Butler . That was, in part, what helped Brian Grazer agree to lend the juice of his company Imagine Entertainment to the project. Another key factor in Grazers decision, as he later told attendees of the Produced By Conference in Los Angeles, was Strongs description of Empire in the pitch meeting: Danny gave me the headline of King Lear in the world of hip-hop, Grazer recalled, and I knew very little about King Lear , but I did know all about hip-hop.

As word spread that Daniels and Strong were headed to television and had Imagine backing them, a bidding war broke out over Empire . Fox won, even trumping offers from some cable networks, because, as Daniels said to the Hollywood Reporter , Most of my relatives cant afford cable, but they can afford Fox. [And] Fox would let me be me as much as they could let me be me.

Letting Daniels be Daniels might just be the best decision the network made all year, with dividends nobody had anticipated. From the moment the pilot episode aired on January 7, 2015, Empire immediately bucked every ratings trend imaginable. The show was watched by twice as many women as men, in particular drawing in African American womenwho, according to Vulture , helped the series score higher ratings than some of that months NFL playoff games. The show also scored twice as many viewers as any other scripted drama on Fox in Hispanic households. Most important, the coveted eighteen-to-forty-nine demographic kept returning week after week, either watching the show as it aired, catching it on their DVRs, or checking out episodes as they made their way online.