'Empire' returns: Still soapy, still subversive

* EMPIRE. 9 tonight, Fox 29.

* ROSEWOOD. 8 tonight, Fox 29.

AMID the soap opera trappings of "Empire" - Catfight! Fatal disease misdiagnosed! Exes who can't let go! - it can be easy to forget just how subversive it is.

As last season's breakout hit returns to Fox tonight, Cookie (Taraji P. Henson) is here to remind us, employing an ugly racial symbol to maximum effect in an entrance that has to be seen to be believed.

And that's not the half of it.

As the Lyon family stages a concert/rally to free Lucious (Terrence Howard), who's awaiting trial in connection with a murder we know he committed, there's a cynical effort to tie the Empire Records founder to the wider issue of the incarceration of African-Americans and to incidents like Ferguson.

In brief encounters with CNN's Don Lemon, the Rev. Al Sharpton (who's not buying Lucious as a victim) and fashion celeb Andre Leon Talley, and with a dismissive swipe at an unseen Bill Clinton and "his wife," Cookie shows the insouciant approach to power and celebrity that her ex-husband did when he, in the first "Empire" episode, referred to the president of the United States, a bit impatiently, as "Barack."

Even Henson herself can't believe some of what goes on.

At a Fox news conference last month, she said she had at one point approached the "video village" monitors where the director and producers are found, and asked, " 'Guys, what are we doing here? I mean, we're talking about taking apart the machine. Like, what is happening?' What did you say, Ilene?"

"Empire" showrunner Ilene Chaiken, an Elkins Park native, declined to repeat her reply in front of reporters, but Lee Daniels, the show's West Philadelphia-raised co-creator, wasn't so shy. "She said, 'We're here to f--- this s--- up,' " Daniels said.

"And I went back to the set like, 'Whoa!' " Henson said.

Whoa, indeed.

Daniels was so eager to keep Henson from giving away spoilers that it's hard to say for sure which machine's being dismantled, but the first three episodes display the same willingness to burn through enormous amounts of plot that distinguished the show's first season.

Lucious, whose death sentence was lifted when his ALS diagnosis turned out to be the more treatable myasthenia gravis, will be staying behind bars long enough to encounter an old acquaintance, played by Chris Rock. (According to the Hollywood Reporter, we have Fox execs to thank for the fact that that character's reputation for cannibalism is alluded to only in passing.)

And Cookie and Lucious' son Jamal (Jussie Smollett) may be letting his newly acquired power go to his head as his mother and brothers Andre and Hakeem (Trai Byers and Philly's Bryshere Gray) fight him for control.

Daniels often invokes the prime-time soap "Dynasty" when talking about "Empire," but his willingness to push the show into challenging areas reflects another influence - that of "All in the Family" creator Norman Lear.

Lear, he told me, is "my friend and my hero, my mentor, my everything."

The veteran producer helped him make the transition from film to television, he said.

"I didn't want to get into TV. I really threw my nose up at TV for a long time. I come from theater. . . . I stumbled into television, but when I got here finally, I was like, 'How do I tell the truth and how do I tell a story?' And Norman said, 'You have to keep your eyes on the ball.' It was very powerful."

Daniels, who's working on a second musical project for Fox, about a girl group that's just getting started, has also thought about a possible "Empire" spinoff, a prequel involving Cookie's family.

"I have to tell a story that I know," he said. "I can't tell it unless I've lived it. So, OK, here she is now. But how did she get to where she's at right now? Let's go back and understand her mother. Let's go back and understand her sisters. Let's understand the makings of her. That I know. Because I know Cookie."

Given that Cookie and Lucious came from North Philadelphia, wouldn't that be an opportunity for Daniels to finally bring a TV show home?

"Tell Fox," he said, laughing.

In the very first scene of Fox's "Rosewood," which premieres tonight before "Empire," Morris Chestnut is running, shirtless, along a Miami waterfront.

That sound you hear is supposed to be his heart throbbing, not yours, and maybe you'll even notice the scar running down the center of his chest.

No relation to John Singleton's 1997 film about the 1923 massacre in that African-American community in Florida, this "Rosewood" stars Chestnut as a "private pathology consultant," which apparently means that when he's not tooling around town in a yellow GTO convertible, he gets to work in his own space-age lab and say things like, "Black-light my world."

Autopsies have never been this pretty.

It seems like a perfect life, but Dr. Beaumont Rosewood Jr., who likes to call himself "the Beethoven of private pathology" - again, no relation to the movie St. Bernard - has his issues. There's that scar, and his yen to leave his pretty lab so he can harass new-in-town Detective Annalise Villa (Jaina Lee Ortiz) into letting him help solve cases.

Lorraine Toussaint ("Orange Is the New Black") has signed on to play Rosewood's mother. Toussaint's only nine years older than Chestnut, but if the towering absurdities of "Rosewood" haven't lost you by now, this shouldn't be a sticking point.

Tomorrow: Interviews with Wesley Snipes, of NBC's "The Player" and Zachary Levi, of NBC's "Heroes Reborn," both premiering tomorrow night.

Email: graye@phillynews.com

Phone: 215-854-5950

On Twitter: @elgray

Blog: ph.ly/EllenGray