It is no secret that Fox's Empire was the runaway hit of the 2015 broadcast season when it premiered.
After a year since its premiere, Empire has returned from the mid-season hiatus of its second season and the ratings have not disappointed: Variety reported that it garnered a strong 4.7 rating in the coveted 18-49 demographic, with 12.2 million total viewers.
Broadcast television is and has always been, derivative. The hackneyed pitch process from many a movie about Hollywood - "It's like X property, but with Y's setting," or, it's "X movie meets Y movie" - is not too far off from the reality of the industry. Case in point: according to HitFix, SyFy's upcoming Wynonna Earp was pitched as Frozen meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The financial risk involved with launching a new series means that adapting them from an already established series that has proven popular is, in many ways, considered the best practice. When one network has a hit on their hands, the others shamelessly scramble to rip it off, with varying degrees of success.
So the question in the wake of Empire's return is this: where are its imitators? Nowhere to be found and that's to TV's - and the audience's - loss.
Traditionally, networks have shied away from making shows centered around black families or featuring a black actor in a leading role for several reasons. From a historical standpoint, the first is quite critically and obviously racist, but as Chris Rock pointed out while hosting this year's Oscars, this once insidious racism has been transmuted into a kind that is seemingly innocuous, but no less detrimental on many fronts:
"Is Hollywood racist? You're damn right Hollywood's racist, but it ain’t that 'racist' that you’ve grown accustomed to. Hollywood's sorority racist. It's like, 'We like you Rhonda, but you're not a Kappa.'"
The second reason, and perhaps the most counter-intuitive, is the fact that African Americans already watch more TV than any other racial group. According to a 2015 Nielsen report, African Americans watched an average of 200 hours of "live" television per month, far more than their white counterparts, who both historically and currently headlined the vast majority of network TV shows. It seems counter intuitive, then, that network TV wouldn't want to serve who is - in a age of cord-cutting and streaming services - by far its most loyal demographic.
But that's only until you consider racial income inequality, or the still-sizable gap between what white viewers and black viewers make on average. In 2013, The Pew Research Center reported a 12.9 white-to-black median income ratio, which essentially means that on average, white Americans made about 12.9x as much as black Americans, a proportion that hasn't been so high since the late 1980s. In short, advertisers aren't as interested in reaching black viewers, since even though they tend to watch far more TV, they also tend to make less money. Thus networks, who unlike streaming services still rely financially on the advertising paradigm, de-prioritize concerted efforts to reach black audiences, especially since African Americans are already watching the mostly whitewashed TV lineup they're pedaling.
But here's where Empire comes in: a show about a black family's rise to success and the drama that ensues, has, by and large, won the ratings game and single-handedly proven that a quality drama incorporating black culture can achieve mainstream success.
So why haven't other networks figured out that it's in their best interest to draw black TV fans to one show by which, to varying degrees, they might feel represented to generate a hit show, rather than allowing them to continue to disperse their high viewership across much of network TV?
While ABC has Black-ish, and NBC has The Carmichael Show, both of which are comedies about black families, no network, except Fox, has yet attempted to launch a must-watch drama centered around a black family.
Black audiences deserve to be served as TV viewers by seeing black families represented onscreen in genres other than comedy. Empire has proved that this is a win-win for viewers and networks alike, and networks are crazy not to capitalize on it.