Empire

So I'm a sucker for 90's R&B. It's never sweet or bad enough for me in that area. Give me a roaring fire, two pallets of body lotion, a bearskin, and the constant wail of professional whiners like Blackstreet, Brownstone, and Jodeci and I'll spin like a curled-up cat against the heater. You really need that love for the genre if you want to sit out more than one episode of Empire, because it sometimes seems like you're watching a 40-minute R. Kelly video clip. Nice slippery tunes, but extremely mediocre acting and an accumulation of clichés. Lucious Lyon is the king of an urban record label. If people don't do what Lucious says, he'll beat them up, because that's apparently how urban record label bosses work (Taste a slightly cynical undertone here. Taste it very much.). Lucy is sick. He has ALS. You know, that disease for which there is now a medicine because Jeroen van der Boom and the entire cast of GTST on YouTube threw a bucket of ice cold water over themselves (Again some cynicism.). For his succession, Lucious looks at his offspring. Not his entire offspring, because one of the scions is gay and Lucious doesn't like that. Despite the fact that Frank Ocean's comedian has shown that few people – except for some uneducated primates – are really hot or cold with homosexuality in the urban scene, Fox still seems to think it's a 'thing'. When it comes to black culture, of course someone has to be in prison (does that cynicism ever end?!) and in Empire it's the mother of Lucious's children, Cookie. When she is released and also starts to interfere with the business, the turnips are completely cooked. Fox has managed to squeeze all the existing stereotypes about the hip-hop/urban world, gays, women and black America into one show. As if that wasn't admirable enough, they also managed to get a not so bad cast to act as members of amateur theater association 'Vrolijk op de planks' from Bunschoten. This actually makes the characters more caricatures and your toes anxiously search for space with every dialogue to come to full curve in your Nike Roshe Run. How Empire managed to put together a 7.7 on IMDb is a complete mystery to me, because in Huize Gumstarr he gets a pass with the heels over the ditch and only because there is some nice bad music in it.

Can someone tell me where the episodes are?