Eric Thurm | The Verge

Halt and Catch Fire is the perfect show about tech innovation

2017-08-18T09:27:03-04:00

Most film and TV stories about innovation suggest that technological progress is the product of isolated, great men — almost exclusively men — working on fresh ideas, undeterred by the sweep of history or their peers’ small-mindedness. Consider The Social Network, The Imitation Game, or any of the world’s surplus of Steve Jobs biopics, which perfected this narrative. They all focus on misunderstood geniuses, asking, “Are they alienated because they’re brilliant, or brilliant because they’re alienated?”

Halt and Catch Fire knows this is bullshit. The AMC series, which begins its fourth and final season on August 19th, is the best depiction of technological innovation on television, because it focuses on collaboration rather than constraint, problem-solving over vision, and people instead of potential Academy Award trophies. Halt and Catch Fire fleshes out its characters, and shows how their personalities supplement their work, instead of servicing it.

The show begins in 1983, with Joe MacMillan (Lee Pace) assembling a team to reverse-engineer a new PC from a proprietary IBM design. That team, and the rest of the show’s main cast, consists of genius coder Cameron Howe, played by Mackenzie Davis (the internet’s girlfriend in the Black Mirror episode “San Junipero”) and married engineers Gordon (Scoot McNairy) and Donna Clark (Kerry Bishé).

The series focuses on collaboration rather than constraint, and problem-solving over vision

Halt and Catch Fire’s first season is rocky. It’s heavily indebted to Mad Men, and it relies on Joe’s “mysterious” charms as the sort of enigmatic, brilliant figure who would be the center of a more conventional tech biopic. But beginning with the second season, the show shifts its focus to the partnership between Donna and Cameron as they become the co-stewards of Mutiny, a gaming company that later expands into other early internet ventures, like Chat and eTail. It becomes about the way its characters work together, rather than — or in addition to — the ways they butt heads.

Joe, admittedly, assumes a largely nefarious role throughout the series, and the Steve Jobs parallels are impossible to ignore. He wears a lot of sweaters, gives cryptic speeches to the press, and spends a lot of time posing for magazine covers. He’s a face, but he’s also a deconstruction of the myth of the misunderstood, erratic genius that surrounds Jobs and similar types. His primary benefit is to see where the world is going, and push the other characters in the right direction.

Cameron has a propensity for vision in line with Joe’s, filtered through her confidence in her own ability to code and a steadfast conviction that her ideas are always the best ones. Her chaotic energy and anarchic tendencies let her harness the frat house energy of Mutiny’s younger coders, who are prone to throwing fireworks around the office, squirting each other (and their equipment) with water pistols, and lighting up at all possible opportunities. She is stymied when it comes to translating her ideas into business success.

Each of the character permutations has its own kind of energy

In turn, both Joe and Cameron are constrained by the Clarks’ practical nature. Gordon is a pushover with the technical skill to actualize the vision of the Camerons and Joes of the world. Donna is a born executive capable of shepherding Mutiny into being a real company. Gordon and Donna are often pushed into being parental figures for the other characters: Gordon’s the doofy dad who’s wiser than he seems, while Donna’s the tough mom holding her rowdy coding children to account.

Each of the permutations has its own particular energy. Joe and Gordon are an effective team, during the rare moments when they’re on the same page. Joe and Cameron’s connection is like a creative rocket, until their partnership implodes. Gordon and Donna’s practicality makes their relationship solid, until they start struggling. And Donna and Cameron’s partnership is the most powerful of all, pushing through all of the problems that would normally hinder women starting a tech company in the 1980s.

When the fourth and final season begins in 1994, the cast is scattered to the winds: Cameron is working remotely from Tokyo, Joe is in isolation in a basement surrounded by Post-Its, and Gordon is running an internet company himself. Donna is now the villain, having made partner at a venture capital firm and chosen fancy juices and board meetings over grimy mainframes and hastily assembled wiring. But Halt and Catch Fire is never that simple. She has to deal with workplace sexism that would make her the uncomplicated hero of any other period piece.

As the series heads toward the finish line, the characters begin to aggressively ask, “What projects are worth our time? Have we chosen well?” Joe, Cameron, and Gordon are set to race against Donna’s firm to, essentially, invent Google (or “index” the web, as they put it), a project with nebulous practical applications in the moment. Joe and Gordon butt heads over the project, while Cameron is apathetic at best. Gordon makes an extended analogy to Thomas Edison in which he describes their safer, more utilitarian work as running a power company.

To its credit, Halt and Catch Fire refuses to take seriously the argument that “non-creatives” exist solely to stifle the visionary inventors. When Cameron makes the game of her dreams, no one wants to play it — and the show suggests that it’s fairly obtuse. Joe’s manipulative tendencies are, if not necessary for his big-picture obsessions with new, open forms of communication, at least an unfortunate side effect. Donna’s talent for micromanaging is extraordinarily useful when it comes to running a company and keeping Cameron on track, but it also accelerates the breakdown of her partnership with Cameron and her marriage to Gordon.

The cast of Halt and Catch Fire is truly formidable when they work together as a team, which only strengthens the show’s unintentional, central dramatic irony: no matter how successful they are, the characters will never manage to accomplish anything truly innovative. Because the series is ostensibly set in the “real” world, the former Mutiny team is constantly circling around actually getting to be the people who come to the big conclusions, and make the big bucks. They will never accomplish their professional goals, at least not in the ways they expect.

But success on those terms isn’t really the point, Halt and Catch Fire suggests. The show has always focused more on the process. Its visual style manages to charge meetings, coding sessions, or a group of people standing in front of a whiteboard with creative potential. The opening shot of the season premiere is quieter than True Detective’s much-lauded tracking shot, but it manages to use sustained camera movement to follow not a physical space, but the passage of time. The team’s warehouse office goes from an empty room full of pencils and coding books to a bustling hive of activity, even as Joe has clearly remained in stasis.

Rather than just doing one innovation-drama story — Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs — Halt and Catch Fire has done all of them, and, most impressively, suggested that they aren’t over. One focus of the season appears to be Donna and Gordon’s children, now rowdy, rebellious teenagers capable of engaging in their own coding projects. Will they learn from their parents, whose greatest accomplishments come in moments of collaboration and openness to other perspectives? Handing down a point of view, rather than an idol — a work in progress, rather than an eternally finished project — might be a start.

Why NBC’s Hannibal deserves (and can easily get) a second life online

2015-06-23T16:44:17-04:00

Yesterday, NBC canceled a show you probably didn’t watch. Or, rather, it expressly declined to renew that show, only three episodes into its latest season, ripping off the band-aid early and saving any will-they-or-won’t-they renewal drama. By now, this is a familiar story, especially on NBC. It could have been Kings. It could have been Sean Saves the World. It could have been Awake. But this time it was Hannibal, one of the best, most innovative shows currently on TV.

This story has an even more predictable next act, which is already underway: behold, the #SaveHannibal hashtag, the change.org petition, and all-caps pleas from showrunner Bryan Fuller. Usually this part is sad and depressing, because it tends to be a lose-lose situation: fan campaigns to save canceled TV shows rarely work, and when they do the result is almost never as good as the original run. But I’ve never been less worried about a show finding a new home, or more excited to see what comes next, because Hannibal is special.

I’ve never been less worried about a show finding a new home

Streaming services have recently been reviving supposedly dead series frequently enough to be a legitimate trend, but not just any show can get resuscitated. With each returned series it’s become easier to identify what Hannibal Lecter might call the recipe for such returns from the industry dead. In most cases, there’s an intensely devoted fan base (Community), a sense of uniqueness surrounding the property (The Mindy Project), and, perhaps most important of all, a business arrangement that allows a streaming service to step in with minimal hassle, particularly when said service is already hosting the show (Longmire). Explaining how Hannibal fulfills all three also serves to tell potential new viewers just what kind of meal they’ve been missing out on, and why they might do well to join in on calls for another course.

NBC

Anyone who hasn’t seen Hannibal and knows it only as “NBC’s Hannibal Lecter show” might be surprised by the collective mourning from the show’s rabidly cultish fans, but it’s got all of the ingredients for devotion. Fuller’s showrunning sensibilities run toward the weird and lovable (check out the delightfully macabre fairytale Pushing Daisies, the series he made before Hannibal), and the characters he has created here are powerful and fresh riffs of the done-to-death Hannibal Lecter story.

No matter your attachment or indifference to the source material, Hannibal is a thoroughly unconventional masterclass in adaptation. Pick up one of Thomas Harris’ novels or watch Silence of the Lambs, and you will see the ways Fuller has picked out the deeper themes of what are, essentially, decent crime novels and movies, and transformed them into something richer and far more unsettling. In Harris’ Red Dragon novel, Will Graham is a former FBI agent plagued with an uncomfortable ability to empathize with serial killers and a passing, violent acquaintance with the captured Hannibal Lecter. Here, as played by the dashing Hugh Dancy, he’s an emotional wreck caught in a tangle of emotional intimacy and psychosexual struggle with Lecter.

The show digs into the old trope that any good detective is just a few steps away from becoming a criminal and refuses to let go, insistently exploring what that actually means. In part, the show owes that depth to Mikkelsen’s portrayal of Hannibal Lecter, who here is a much more credible and terrifying monster than his cinematic counterparts — a model of restraint, an otherworldly being who is both seductive and undeniably inhuman. But there’s also the way in which the show and its impressive art department treats its murders as literal works of art — baroque, bloody works that command respect. We know who Hannibal is and what he does, but we want to spend time him anyway (or at least ship him with Will).

By the premiere of its third and current season (of which there are still 10 episodes yet to air) Hannibal had just begun to fully escape the gravity of its initial premise, tossing aside practically all trappings of a cop procedural. The season premiere found Hannibal and his former therapist Bedelia du Maurier (Gillian Anderson — yes, she’s in this show, too) wandering around Italy and appreciating its natural and culinary beauty rather — nothing so staid as “catching a killer.” When I interviewed him this year for The Guardian, Fuller described the show in its current form as a “pretentious art film from the ‘80s.”

NBC

Fuller is the primary reason reason to stick with the show and root for its continuation (he’s got a six-season roadmap for how to tell a complete Hannibal Lecter story), as well as its best shot at finding another life. He’s used to creating aggressively beloved shows that are snatched away too soon, with series that have been canceled after one (Wonderfalls) or two seasons (Pushing Daisies, Dead Like Me) — if they even made it to series (the 2012 pilot-turned-TV-movie Mockingbird Lane). In one sense, it’s a miracle that Hannibal even made it to a third season on broadcast television, especially considering how far has positioned itself from previously existing genre conventions.

And by that logic, as great as Hannibal is, it’s really not that surprising that it’s being cut loose — NBC has a long history of terrible decisions, but canceling Hannibal wasn’t one of them. The viewership for Hannibal, at least by the statistics that matter in making these sorts of calls, is pretty awful. The network did a pretty decent job marketing a show this off-kilter, and let it run far longer than any Bryan Fuller series thus far, let alone one this violent, complex, and homoerotic. It just couldn’t thrive on NBC — like Arrested Development being booted from FOX in 2006, it might just have been ahead of its time.

In a press release about the cancellation, Fuller notes that “a hungry cannibal can always dine again.” He’s played coy about the likelihood that his continued interest in a fourth season will be actualized, but it’s really not so hard to imagine. The licensing fees for the show are reportedly so low — Entertainment Weekly cites the number at a mere $175,000 per episode — that even a Kickstarter could maybe pay for a couple of episodes. It’s been perpetually in danger of cancellation, to the point where Fuller had a plan in place at the end of season one. And Amazon, which has made strong inroads into original programming recently, already has exclusive streaming rights to the show.

NBC literally let them show a man cutting off and eating his own nose

Look, there are 10 weeks left to watch the third season and see if Fuller will pull a fourth together. I’m confident he will. But even if this is truly the end for Hannibal, we’ll be thankful in a few years — the most influential series are often the shortest lived. Hannibal has been bold enough to blow up much of the playbook for what is and is not acceptable on broadcast TV — NBC literally let Fuller show a man cutting off and eating his own nose. So even if Hannibal goes down in history as another show that left us too soon, it can rest easy knowing it left an undeniably purple, permanent knife mark on TV history.

Better Call Saul is too good to be a spinoff

2015-02-06T09:00:17-05:00

The airwaves are littered with the rival successors to TV’s so-called “golden age,” but only one has spawned a straight-up spin-off. Better Call Saul, which premieres Sunday on AMC, focuses on the early life of “criminal lawyer” Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk) when he was struggling lawyer Jimmy McGill, six years before the events of Breaking Bad. And spoiler alert — it’s excellent. That’s unsurprising given the assembled talent behind and in front of the camera, but somewhat paradoxically, the quality of Better Call Saul serves as a strong argument that creators Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould should have made a series outside of the shadow of Walter White.

At the height of television’s second golden age, the success of TV shows was usually attributed to singular auteurs, writer-showrunners whose visions for their series guide years-long projects — David Chase, David Simon, David Milch, some other dudes named David, all in the Difficult Men vein. But the medium is far more collaborative than that lens would give it credit for, something that has become increasingly apparent as our collective obsession with every aspect of our shows moves beyond the “cult of the showrunner.” Directors are increasingly important to the process — the biggest creative influence on The Knick isn’t writers Jack Amiel and Michael Begler, but Steven Soderbergh. Even actors often contribute to the writing for their characters — Bryan Cranston was reportedly the motivating force behind Walt’s sliver of redemption in the Breaking Bad finale.

But while Breaking Bad may have catapulted Cranston and Aaron Paul to superstardom, it’s arguably done more for the people behind the camera. Writer Moira Walley-Beckett has her own series (Starz’s Flesh and Bone), producer George Mastras has a development deal with HBO, and Michelle MacLaren is one of the hottest working directors. And with creator Vince Gilligan and producer Peter Gould getting almost the whole band back together, it’s almost impossible to imagine Better Call Saul being straight-up bad. But the idea did have the potential to devolve into merely well-executed fanservice, throwing out glimpses of Walt in the background or a young Jesse Pinkman getting in trouble with the law.

As a spin-off of Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul has an even higher bar to clear than most television shows (which have to justify their continued presence on the air and network resources) — it has to uphold a legacy. And if there’s one thing that’s hard to dispute about the show, it’s this: the pilot of Better Call Saul is more assured, better-directed, and simply better than Breaking Bad’s, something that appears to be almost entirely due to the increased comfort and seasoning of the team. It’s not just that Gilligan, Gould, MacLaren, and everyone else have improved at their jobs over the course of the past six years — it’s that they’ve gotten so good at working together and realizing each other’s visions.

It simply has a better pilot than ‘Breaking Bad’ did

Sitting down to watch the first episodes of Better Call Saul, I was a nervous wreck. (I probably have more invested in Breaking Bad than any other television show — I wrote my undergraduate thesis about it.) But more than anything else, watching Better Call Saul is comforting; it feels like going home. There’s the same lethally potent attention to minor tasks (mostly related to cooking), the same wryness in the music selection, and the same maddening cold opens. The inevitable return to the beautiful desert vistas the crew crafted over the years is powerful, like smelling an old piece of clothing. Even seeing names in the credits from Gilligan to Jonathan Banks to editor Skip Macdonald is a joy.

And it’s evident just how much everyone loves working together, and how much they’ve grown. There are moments in Better Call Saul that could go head to head with anything on Breaking Bad, especially a visually arresting sequence in the MacLaren-directed second episode that artfully condenses the day-to-day indignities of Jimmy’s life as a public defender — an entire series on its own — into just a couple of minutes. MacLaren finds him basically everywhere at once in the courthouse, making it feel like someplace we’ve lived for years.

Oddly enough, the success of MacLaren and credited writer Gould in creating this environment is the best piece of evidence that Gilligan and company didn’t really need the comforts of home. The manner in which Better Call Saul suggests the ease of its own creation makes one wonder about the multitude of ways it could have been its own series. The producers’ renewed confidence lends itself to a real sense of play, along with the series’ general more comic bent. (Though the pilot, the best of the three episodes sent to critics, is also the grimmest.) Breaking Bad was often funny, but it could also be unceasingly serious and morbid, perhaps because the team grew increasingly aware that it was making a Great Drama. Better Call Saul may eventually fully establish itself as its own show, but the Breaking Bad mantle is still a veneer of capital-S Seriousness threatening to weigh it down.

In fact, most of the good things about Better Call Saul don’t need to take place in the Breaking Bad universe at all. The elements that explicitly tie the two series are some of the weaker aspects of the show. A pair of goofy kids meant to evoke Jesse Pinkman fall almost totally flat. The surprise return of a beloved Breaking Bad character is fun, but it’s that character’s accomplice who becomes far more compelling. The one notable exception is the best part of Better Call Saul so far — its opening sequence, which depicts Saul’s life after the conclusion of Breaking Bad as, at once, deeply comic, worn, and bone-chillingly sad. It’s a blitzkrieg of dramatic irony, and not only does it plant a flag firmly at the end of Jimmy’s story, it gives us a frame through which to view his life and choices and sets up Better Call Saul’s distinct thematic concerns.

Where Breaking Bad is about someone consistently choosing to do the wrong thing, Better Call Saul is about someone trying to do the right thing, at a cost. The most intriguing secondary character on the show isn’t Jonathan Banks’ Mike (whom I love, but has had more than enough time in the spotlight), but Michael McKean’s Chuck, Jimmy’s older brother and fading moral lighthouse who is also suffering from some sort of debilitating mental illness. Dealing with his brother is far more emotionally complicated than anything Saul had to do on Breaking Bad (where he was, essentially, comic relief), and Odenkirk’s performance is accordingly far more nuanced and impressive, imbuing his future pronouncements (“Conscience gets expensive, doesn’t it?”) with new pathos.

There are a few things Better Call Saul appears to be about — the way people get led by systems into difficult moral decisions, the performative nature of the adversarial legal system (there might be more time spent on Jimmy rehearsing for the courtroom than any other activity), and even the power of speech (Jimmy’s “mouth”). It’s important that all of those ideas are bigger than Jimmy himself, whereas Breaking Bad was exactly as big as Walt and his decisions. On this show, the bad things that happen are the result of misunderstandings — the main plot is kicked off by a literal case of mistaken identity – because Better Call Saul is comic, rather than tragic. Jimmy is hapless and legitimately unlucky, swept about by forces out of his control while trying to do his best, rather than making the singular, moral decision that Walt makes at the beginning of Breaking Bad. In some respects, that’s more relatable.

Once the novelty of a ‘Breaking Bad’ spin-off that isn’t terrible has worn off, what’s left?

Still, while some version of Better Call Saul has the potential to be “better” than Breaking Bad, it’s not this one. The show could grow into a great exploration of smaller, more human concerns, but as it is now, it’s perpetually threatened to be overshadowed by the mythos it chose to place itself within. Once the novelty of a Breaking Bad spin-off that isn’t terrible has worn off, what’s left? Those quick hits of fanservice will always put it in its place, which is a shame when the show has the potential to be so much more. The best case scenario is that it uses its predecessor as a foundation, groundwork for a totally different kind of story that still functions as a subset of the Breaking Bad franchise — but its tools are being deployed in service of a piece of art that doesn’t need the assist.

At the end of the day, I don’t need to know how Saul Goodman became Saul Goodman. Gilligan and Gould could have told a story about this exact character, with all of the same people on the creative team and all of the same ideas, but not in service of their previous work. After watching the first three episodes of Better Call Saul, I want to see what happens to Jimmy McGill. I just wish I didn’t already know.

The Nightly Show, four nights later

2015-01-23T14:52:45-05:00

On a Tuesday evening, as the audience settles in for its second episode ever, the people at The Nightly Show take some pains to let us know that the crew has the cheapest microphones money can buy. At the beginning of the broadcast, host Larry Wilmore expresses confusion at having to do a second episode, but everyone on set is a little dazed that the show is happening at all. The entire staff are pros — they’d have to be to rise to the challenge of taking over The Colbert Report’s post-Daily Show spot on Comedy Central — but that doesn’t mean it isn’t taking them a little time to get their bearings and stop worrying about whether or not we’ll think they’re funny.

Tonight, that anxiety mostly manifests itself in self-deprecating jokes about their production values. In his pre-show remarks, WiImore asks how we like the way the set — particularly the large panel table — looks, and tells us that some people have expressed confusion at the design. He’s faux-hurt, but it still sounds like it stings — it’s his show, after all. That attitude helps contribute to a scrappy upstart vibe at the taping — it may be airing on Comedy Central with a massive marketing campaign, but to us, it’s still an underdog. And we respond accordingly. It’s only the second episode, but when Wilmore walks over to the table, everyone chants “Larry! Larry! Larry!” That’s just what you do at a show like this.

When Wilmore walks over to the table, everyone chants “Larry! Larry! Larry!”

But if the show’s first few episodes are any indication, The Nightly Show is a lot closer to the finish line than one might have predicted. Having already watched the very solid premiere episode the night before, I had some idea of what to expect when I showed up for the Tuesday taping. Out in the line, my friend shared his opinion of the show so far: The panel segment was the best, and he hopes Wilmore keeps it up. In that case, “It’ll be like Bill Maher, but funny and not racist!” He’s not wrong, since Wilmore describes the show as a blend of The Daily Show and Maher’s Politically Incorrect.

Oddly enough, the Daily Show-inspired half has been the flattest. Which makes sense, because more than anything else, The Nightly Show ends up resembling the roundtable discussions from a Sunday morning cable news hour.

If there’s any TV format more rigidly formulaic than the late-night talk show, it’s the Sunday morning political hour. ABC’s This Week (where, in the interest of full disclosure, I was an intern), CBS’ Face The Nation, and of course NBC’s Meet The Press are, essentially, a three-card monte of information — for the most part, they plow through “the same dozen lawmakers, journalists, and pundits in a rotating order.” They thrive on the presence of those personalities and their prepared statements, which are “newsworthy” and make good television because of who they are. And they have more viewers than The Daily Show.

“It’ll be like Bill Maher, but funny and not racist!”

On The Nightly Show, what’s important is what the guests have to say. The first episode had big names, even if they are only stars among a small segment of the population — Talib Kweli, Bill Burr, rising political star Cory Booker. (And, of course, ratings will dictate that Wilmore’s bookers take big names where they can find them.) But the second episode shifted focus to voices that likely wouldn’t be seen on television, and their thoughts on a single issue — the preponderance of rape allegations against Bill Cosby.

The focus on one topic suggests another show helmed by a former Daily Show correspondent. But where Last Week Tonight takes more of a newsmagazine approach, digging in and researching on a particular topic that might not be in the headlines, The Nightly Show‘s reliance on panels creates a discussion about the implications of the news and how we should think about it. That’s not to say that Wilmore doesn’t inject himself as a host. “We’ll answer the question, ‘Did he do it?'” he says at the top of the show, suggesting a Dateline-like investigative report of the sort that usually ends with a soft “maybe.” Instead, he commits: “The answer will be yes.” Or, put another way, “That motherfucker did it!”

But the real center of attention is the dynamic between the panel members and the strength of their arguments — “The proof is common sense,” as Wilmore puts it. Though there are jokes, there’s also a sincere conversation about the implications of patriarchy and the way Cosby’s celebrity contributed to a collective unwillingness to believe his accusers, motivated largely by Ebony digital editor Jamilah Lemieux, who gets to make points about the way women who accuse men of rape are marginalized (when was the last time a rape victim got anything out of lying?). So the veneer of a comedy show allows the expression of uncomfortable truths and opinions in honesty. During the segment explicitly devoted to honesty — “Keep It 100” — there was a real, off-the-cuff fight between Keith Robinson and Baratunde Thurston over the relative importance of Thurston’s integrity and racial identity that was entertaining, revealing, and passionate. It was excellent television.

It’s rare for there to be a new thing in late night, but The Nightly Show seems to have gotten its best material from cobbling together the parts of several other genres and using them to support each other in the pursuit of presenting a consistent, thoughtful take on the world. Where The Daily Show and The Colbert Report classified themselves as “fake news,” an umbrella under which they hid from criticism, The Nightly Show seems much more like “news with jokes and moral perspective.” And, from my brief experience in the studio, the audience appears to be a crucial part of both parts. Rather than simply padding out the show with laughs, the bits the studio audience most applauded were statements about the travesty of the way rape victims are treated, or Wilmore rejecting anyone who cared whether the total number of accusers was 34 or 35. When Robinson claimed that some of Cosby’s accusers were lying, there were audible boos.

So much of television production — especially late night TV — is an alchemy of balancing hundreds of factors, from the chemistry of a cast (something late night shows essentially have to reset every night by putting their host next to a different guest), to the coordination between the crew to effectively capture the show, to the writers, who are often trying to figure out a series’ strengths months into the process. The first few months of any late night show are, essentially, watching a work in progress — a series of drafts for a consistent show. The taping of the second episode of The Nightly Show was close to the roughest version of that draft, and right now it’s using everything in its toolkit, even its audience, to advance the blend of satire, news, and political talk show it’s shooting for. Will it succeed? “Relax,” Wilmore repeatedly says during the pre-show Q&A. They’re still figuring it out.

The soapy, limited hip-hop mythmaking of Fox’s Empire

2015-01-07T14:55:58-05:00

The pilot for Lee Daniels’ Shakespearean hip-hop soap Empire starts with record executive Lucious Lyon (Terrence Howard) in the studio, frustrated with one of his artists trying to lay down a track. She’s just not giving it that pop, that spark it needs to take off. “I need you to sing like you are going to die tomorrow,” Lucious says after the first failed take. The second doesn’t hit either, so he enters the booth and asks her to remember her brother’s murder: “How did it feel when you had to go identify his body?” And the third time’s the charm — she nails it. Turning soulful singing into an equation — or an artist’s adversity into a marketable product — and repeating it ad infinitum is the secret of Lucious’ job.

Empire is about the “music industry,” a phrase that will always be innately contradictory

Empire is about the “music industry,” a phrase that will always be innately contradictory. Selling music is a business, one that lends itself to all kinds of dramatic intrigue on series like Nashville, Mozart In The Jungle, and Power. In its pilot, at least, Empire itself emphasizes commerce over art — Lucious’ company is called Empire Enterprises, not Empire Records (a name that, admittedly, has already been taken). And it derives most of its dramatic tension from that end of the industry. Rather than focusing on any of the characters’ difficulties with artistic inspiration for its own sake, Lucious’ business has to remain profitable in a replicable fashion, at least if his plan to save the music industry by taking Empire public is to succeed.

That plan requires the ailing mogul (he’s been recently diagnosed with ALS) to pick a new figurehead for the company — to determine which of his sons will succeed him. The three sons, all theoretically competitors for leadership of the company, are effectively positioned on a spectrum that posits an inverse relationship between business knowledge and charisma. Andre (Trai Byers), the eldest son, is an immensely intelligent, cold-blooded executive who’s clearly the most qualified to run a company but largely expressionless, consigned to scheming with his Lady Macbeth-like wife. He’s a representative of the increasingly dominant pure business approach to music, but Empire isn’t just a series of calculations — Lucious tells Andre it has to remain a “celebrity-driven brand,” which should therefore be run by a celebrity (who will somehow have time to run a publicly traded company while being a public figure).

Empire subscribes to a management philosophy that’s more Jay Z than Lyor Cohen

That personality-fueled approach lends itself to a series as over-the-top in its dramatics as Empire aspires to be, and it subscribes to a management philosophy that’s more Jay-Z (on whom Lucious is clearly based) than, say, Lyor Cohen. And it’s why his first choice to lead the company is Hakeem (Bryshere Y. Gray), his youngest son, a gifted hip-hop artist (you can tell because he uses the Migos flow at the end of the episode) who has never worked for anything and suffers from an alcohol problem. Hakeen has both the creativity and impulse control of a child, and is reminiscent of some of hip-hop’s extremely talented enfant terribles — Chief Keef or Tyler The Creator circa 2010; acts whose “shocking” and “unstable” antics are part of how we understand their success. Though Keef’s legal problems contribute to his image, they’ll likely only remain useful so long as he can keep producing hits.

Then there’s Jamal (Jussie Smollett), the middle son: both a talented, passionate songwriter and reasonably intelligent, put-together human being. But he’s seemingly passive and unwilling to take charge of his career, or, as Lucious would have it, overcome his homosexuality. Lucious’ is of the opinion that a gay artist — and, apparently, executive — can’t sell to the black community or white kids. (Clearly Frank Ocean, on whom Jamal appears to be at least partially based, doesn’t exist in the world of Empire.) Lucious is all about mass appeal, building a persona that can satisfy everyone at once. Jamal, meanwhile, is apparently largely successful in Brooklyn and San Francisco — a limited audience, but one indicative of an increasingly diversified pop music landscape where only four albums sell over a million copies. (Though Jamal’s story inevitably seems like it will find him making crossover hits.)

Lucious seems to think that he can identify intense individuality and sell it to the masses — his perspective on the intersection of art and commerce. When Hakeem lays down a track Jamal helped him write, Lucious is impressed, but downplays Jamal’s contributions. He attributes success to “that monster in you, that genius.” And in its pilot, Empire would seem to confirm Lucious’ theory that the right people — the ones possessed by that monster — are paid for their emotional labor in artistic talent, or at least business success.

Clearly Frank Ocean doesn’t exist in the world of Empire

At the heart of this is Lucious’ own dark back story: we learn that he murdered several people early in his pre-record-industry criminal career, and his ex-wife Cookie (a stellar Taraji P. Henson), served a 30-year sentence after covering up for his involvement in the drug trade. In a way this is yet another retelling of the dominant narrative of the Successful Rapper. Jay Z’s origin story has been told so many times it’s now functionally a series of tropes for him to reference on phoned-in guest verses. Get Rich Or Die Tryin’ is literally a movie dramatizing 50 Cent’s beginnings. And Rick Ross built his career upon a completely fictionalized variation on this myth.

In practice, Lucious’ approach — personal drama as a pre-requisite for becoming a star — is disastrous. As he suggests to his board, the music business has changed, from the model where one is rewarded for having a strong will and a difficult life, because of the internet. Because of illegal downloading, he says, it’s now “impossible for disenfranchised kids growing up in the projects to overcome poverty the way that I did.” He believes he can change this by taking the company public, and maintaining the same model for exchange between humanity (as art) and money. This is a deeply conservative myth (not to mention one that’s afraid of the internet to a Sorkinesque degree) premised in the ability of Lucious and others like him to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. The full picture here makes sense, but there’s rot at the base.

Empire often looks like a relic from 2006

The biggest threat to Lucious’ empire comes from Cookie, who notes that he was only able to obtain his wealth with an initial investment from criminal activity — something which has become just as much a part of that myth of his success. Lucious and Cookie’s implication that those crimes were justified by his later success makes the entirety of Empire Enterprises a house of cards — one that demands a dark, soapy secret at the heart of substantial wealth. And it leaves Empire looking a bit like a relic from 2006.

There are certainly real-life artists in 2015 who one can easily manage being signed to Empire — Pusha T, YG, even Kendrick Lamar (whose Good Kid, M.A.A.d City is sort of an album-length version of this sort of narrative) — but there’s more than enough diversity in the hip-hop landscape to support different approaches to making and selling music. The sort of niches Lucious rejects have been filled by everyone from Chance The Rapper to Swedish internet sensation Yung Lean. And that’s not even including people who could have been birthed fully-formed from Andre’s account book (Flo Rida, Big Sean, and, of course, Iggy Azalea). Lucious’ view of what it takes for someone to succeed in hip-hop is dangerously narrow-minded, and reinforces unfortunate ideas about what kids should “have to” do to become artists. Let’s hope Empire acknowledges his limitations as it builds.