Empire

January / February, 2015

• At one point in the first episode of Lee Daniels's spectacularly sudsy hip-hop soap opera, drug dealer turned music mogul Lucious Lyon (Terrence How­ard) takes his toddler son out­side and, literally, throws the kid in the trash. At this moment you realize the Precious director has no use for subtlety: He designed Empire to be Fox's answer to the twisty turns of ABC's Scandal (let's call it the unstoppable Shonda Rhimes effect), but he has also added a dash of Dynasty. Like Aaron Spelling's 19...