Empire’s Ilene Chaiken

In its first season, Empire exceeded all expectations. Its ratings increased with each episode and the finale drew 21.1 million viewers in Live+3 measurement. The show is set in the world of hip-hop and centers on the dealings and schemings of a megahit record label. In addition to showcasing lavishly produced musical performances, the series sheds light on issues such as poverty, drugs, crime, prison time and homophobia in ways not often seen on television. Showrunner Ilene Chaiken talks about the reasons for Empire’s breakout success.

TV DRAMA: What was the genesis of Empire and at what point did you join the show? Had the pilot already been made?
CHAIKEN: Yes, as often happens in my business, sometimes tele­vision shows are written and created by people who haven’t actually worked in television before, especially now that more and more filmmakers are getting into television. Tele­vision is getting so good these days, as we all know, and one of the reasons is that some of the best filmmakers are realizing that it is a great medium for storytelling. In the case of Empire, it was Lee Daniels and Danny Strong, who made Lee Daniels’ The Butler. Lee, in particular, had never gotten anywhere near tele­vision, Danny had only worked in television as an actor, but as a writer he was writing big movies. They had an idea to do a television show, which they pitched to Imagine Entertainment [co-founded by Brian Grazer and Ron Howard], and with Imagine they took it to FOX. They made a good pilot. For every pilot that is made in that way, without a showrunner, at a certain point [the network] starts interviewing showrunners because they know they need a senior writer/showrunner to help them execute their vision—somebody who knows how to tell stories on an ongoing basis, how to run a staff, how to do all of these things a showrunner does. That’s the point at which I came in [on Empire], and it was just before the show was picked up.

I had spent most of my career doing my own work, and I became a showrunner doing my own shows. I was in the process of developing a new show when my agents called me and said, There are some people who are asking if you are interested in looking at other shows to showrun, and I said, No, I’m not doing that right now. Then they called me and said they had this Lee Daniels–Danny Strong script, and I said, OK fine, I’ll look at it, but I’m not doing it! I read the script and I said to my agents, It’s really good, it’s hard to pass it up, but still, I don’t want to do it. I want to do my own show. They said, would you just go look at the pilot? Again, reluctantly, I said yes. I went over to FOX. They have you watch the pilots they are thinking of putting on the schedule in the most inhospitable atmosphere! You are all by yourself, so you don’t have any of that group excitement. They put you in a dark little room, somebody locks the door behind you, and nobody even comes out to say hello. An assistant comes to put in the DVD. There really couldn’t be a worse [environment] in which to watch an hour of television! I watched the pilot in that dark little room and as I was walking out I was already on the phone to my agent saying, I’ve got to do this! Tell me who else I have to meet and what I have to do, because I would actually rather do this than my own show right now—that’s how good it is.

TV DRAMA: The show portrays a very particular world. What do you think gave the show such wide appeal?
CHAIKEN: The actual analysis is beyond me, and I wouldn’t even want to venture a guess because it’s sociology; it’s cultural anthropology. But I do think there are a couple of things that are really important, apart from the fact that it’s just good. Television, at its best, takes you into a world in which you haven’t been before and tells you something new, tells fresh stories. It’s a really dynamic medium, and Empire couldn’t be more dynamic; these are really big stories about people who live in our world and who haven’t really been represented on television.

TV DRAMA: The show presents really serious issues wrapped up in a phenomenal entertainment vehicle. How do you balance the two
CHAIKEN: That’s what makes the show work. I used to call tele­vision “stealth activism” because we get to promote an agenda, even though we are not supposed to admit it. We all feel strongly about different things, and I’m not saying Empire has only one agenda or that it’s pushing a political point of view, but we get to embed ideas and they are more powerful because you don’t [realize] that’s what we are doing, because it is entertaining.

TV DRAMA: My life couldn’t be more different from Cookie’s, and yet in every episode I find myself relating to her either as a mother or as a woman. What goes into making Cookie?
CHAIKEN: It’s so many things and it’s alchemy more than anything. I attribute a huge portion of it to Taraji P. Henson. Nobody else could do it. She brings everything to [the character]. It’s the perfect marriage of a character and an actress, and she’s just phenomenal; it’s undeniable.

TV DRAMA: How does the writers’ room work? The characters have such distinct voices. Do certain writers always write the same characters, or do you mix it up?
CHAIKEN: We mix it up. There are writers who write certain characters better. My process is that at a certain point I give every script to a couple of writers I have identified and say, Now you take a pass at it and make sure to bring all of the flavor, all of the detail of that character to the dialogue. That’s the second-to-last step. The last step is the actors get the material and make it their own. It’s fortunate that Lee Daniels and I both come at this in the same way, because if we didn’t it would be problematic. We both love improvisation. He does a lot of improvising when he directs actors. Most television showrunners don’t. Some are very precious about the words; I’m not. I think it’s much more vibrant when the actors feel a little free. They know their characters incredibly well, and they have to own them, they have to believe in them. It’s really a lot of fun to let them have some room to play.

TV DRAMA: There are jaw-dropping moments in each episode. How do you balance them with moving the story forward?
CHAIKEN: Of course, we get very large at times, there are those “Oh my God!” moments, but I would put to you that there is almost not a single moment in Empire—as big as it seems, as extravagant as it seems—that couldn’t be real, that couldn’t actually have happened. One of the things that drew me to the show was Lee saying he wanted to do a black Dynasty. I think that Empire is much more than that and better than that, and I come from Aaron Spelling [producer of Dynasty]. My first job in tele­vision was working for Spelling. To me those shows were confections, and Empire is really grounded in the real world and talks about it in an important way. Here we are telling a story that is about the music business, that’s about entertaining people, that also has those joyful performance elements, and yet the crime stories that we are telling exist in that world. We have all of that available to us, and it’s real and justified. When we say we want to tell a story about such and such, there are writers in the writers’ room who will tell us ten stories of [similar] things that really happened.

TV DRAMA: The show shoots in Chicago. Does that provide for a different experience than shooting in Los Angeles would?
CHAIKEN: I’ve found that [to be the case]. Even though we complain a little bit about remote production, and logistically it’s challenging not to be there—I travel back and forth between Chicago and Los Angeles, with a little more time in Los Angeles than Chicago—my experience has been that when a cast on an ensemble show is outside Los Angeles, they bond in a way that is incredibly beneficial to the project. It becomes a little lab for the work and they are all about the work. If you are in L.A., actors, especially actors on a hit show, go out every night! They are the belles of the ball; everybody wants to see them! I’m not saying that that’s not happening for [the Empire actors], but in Chicago they are a little more focused on the work.

TV DRAMA: In how many days do you shoot an episode? And is Empire different from a series that doesn’t have musical numbers
CHAIKEN: We get the same amount of time to shoot an episode, but there are differences because of the musical numbers. To shoot an hour of television takes anywhere from seven to many more days on a big cable show. We shoot for eight days. What we all learned together over the course of the first season is that our scripts need to be a little shorter than the usual hour-long show. The music takes up time on screen and in the first couple of episodes we were leaving too much on the cutting room floor. But it also takes a lot of time to shoot those numbers.

TV DRAMA: The series has so many famous guest stars: Jennifer Hudson, Marisa Tomei, Chris Rock, Cuba Gooding, Jr. Did you and your staff reach out to them, or did stars also come to you?
CHAIKEN: A lot of people came to us for the second season. Lee Daniels is the most connected person on the face of the Earth! Everybody wants to work with him. He is constantly saying, even now, So-and-so wants to be on the show, what can we do? People came to FOX, people came to me; we actually had to get a grip because it was really thrilling and fabulous, but I think we might even have had one or two too many guest stars in the beginning of the second season.

TV DRAMA: What can you share about the second half of the second season?
CHAIKEN: The second half of season two is all about the family coming back together at Empire. There was all of this fracturing in the first half of the season, and then because of the external adversaries, because of the moves by Mimi and Camilla, they all have to come back together. It doesn’t mean that everybody gets along, by any means, but in the midst of all of their antipathies, they have to fight together to win the Empire back.