It’s rare for a new television drama to debut with the amount of sheer success as FOX’s Empire has had thus far.
It’s even more rare for a Black show on a major primetime network to garner the type of success Empire has had thus far. Wednesday’s night episode had an astonishing 11.5 million viewers and a 46 rating among adults 18-49. Empire is up 53% from its American Idol lead-in and is showing no signs of slowing down anytime soon.
via Entertainment Weekly:
Let’s run this down: Empire is broadcast’s highest-rated drama series in the demo (if you exclude that post-Super Bowl special episode of NBC’s The Blacklist) and the second is ABC’s Scandal. The second-biggest new drama of the season is ABC’s How to Get Away with Murder. On the comedy side, the season’s highest-rated new sitcom is ABC’s Black-ish followed by, now, Fresh Off the Boat. Nobody working in network series development can possibly miss the significance of an unprecedented number of shows with diverse leads dominating the freshman crop of an otherwise dour season. After this year, broadcast TV will almost certainly never look the same.
If you haven’t started watching Empire already — what are you waiting for? Empire airs Wednesdays at 9 on FOX.
