Click, Melissa A., and Sarah Smith-Frigerio. “One Tough Cookie: Exploring Black Women’s Responses to Empire’s Cookie Lyon.” Communication, Culture and Critique 12, no. 2 (March 2019): 287–304.
Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks. Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.
Zook, Kristal Brent. Color by FOX: The FOX Network and the Revolution in Black Television. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
NOTES
I would like to acknowledge and thank Jéan-Claude Quintyne for his research help on a previous version of this essay.
1 1. The FOX network built its viewership in the early 1990s by targeting black audiences with a large slate of racially diverse programming yet largely abandoned this audience (and the shows) after successfully winning white viewers. See Kristal Brent Zook, Color by FOX: The FOX Network and the Revolution in Black Television (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
2 2. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
3 3. “15 Epic Facts about Empire,” E Online.com, www.eonline.com.
4 4. Notably, Lucious only wears this hairstyle in the pilot. By the time the series gets to its second episode (filmed well after the pilot), Lucious sports a short, cropped natural hairstyle.
5 5. Marjon Carlos, “Get That Cookie Look: Online Shopping with Empire’s Costume Designer,” Fusion.net, last updated March 4, 2015, http://fusion.net.
6 6. Ibid.
7 7. McGhee borrowed most of Cookie’s furs from her mother-in-law, Janet Bailey, ex-wife of legendary Earth, Wind, and Fire lead singer Philip Bailey, further highlighting furs as belonging to a past era of black glamor.
8 8. Megan Daley, “Empire: Cookie’s Season 1 Fashion,” Ew.com, last updated September 10, 2015, http://ew.com.
9 9. Urban Dictionary, s.v. “ghetto fabulous,” www.urbandictionary.com.
10 10. Robert Rorke, “Would Cookie Lyon Really Shop at Saks?” New York Post, August 21, 2015, http://nypost.com.
11 11. Ethan Sacks, “Oprah Winfrey’s Brush with Racism Sparks International Incident,” Daily News, last updated August 9, 2013, www.nydailynews.com.
12 12. Kerry Burke, “Barneys Accused Me of Stealing Because I’m Black: Teen,” Daily News, last updated October 24, 2013, www.nydailynews.com.
13 13. Caroline McGuire, “Is This the Style We’ll All Be Wearing This Summer? ‘Baby Hair’ Becomes the Latest Beauty Trend to Hit Catwalks and Is Featured on Everyone from Katy Perry to Rihanna,” Daily Mail, last updated March 16, 2015, www.dailymail.co.uk.
14 14. Ericka Goodman, “Lee Daniels Used to Shoplift from Saks,” The Cut, September 13, 2015, www.thecut.com.
15 15. Interestingly, though Daniels and the entire Empire cast attended the Saks premier in New York, Taraji P. Henson was noticeably absent from the event. Whatever the reason, whether scheduling conflict or otherwise, the absence of “Cookie”—Empire’s fashion icon and the Saks line’s muse—loomed large over the event. Devoid of her authenticating presence, the reality of the Saks Fifth Avenue collection became more apparent: a pastiche of the black aesthetics on Empire as filtered through the lens of established, recognizable, luxury fashion lines such as Jimmy Choo, Alexis Bittar, MCM, Helmut Lang, and Giuseppe Zanotti—brands that would already be familiar to the typical Saks customer.
3
House
Narrative Complexity
AMANDA D. LOTZ
Abstract: In her analysis of the medical/procedural program House, Amanda Lotz shows how a procedural program can exhibit narrative complexity and innovative techniques of character development. Lotz examines how a single episode draws upon a variety of atypical storytelling strategies to convey meaning and dramatize a central theme of the series: “everybody lies.”
In the 2000s, some U.S. dramatic television entertained its audiences with increasingly complicated characters. Series such as FX’s The Shield, Rescue Me, and Sons of Anarchy and AMC’s Mad Men and Breaking Bad explored the complicated personal and professional lives of male characters and maximized the possibilities of television’s storytelling attributes for character development. While several of these series can be properly described as character studies, other narrative forms also provided compelling examples for thinking about characterization, narrative strategies, and television storytelling. Series such as CSI, Law & Order, and the subject of this essay, House, M.D., are organized episodically, so that they can be understood in individual installments, in stark contrast to the serialized character dramas on cable.1 Yet even series that use limited serial components and instead structure their stories around solving some sort of legal or medical case within each episode can provide lead characters with the texture of depth and sophistication.
Episodically structured storytelling dominates the history of television, and this format has typically offered little narrative or character complexity; instead, characters are stuck in what Jeffrey Sconce describes as “a world of static exposition, repetitive second-act ‘complications,’ and artificial closure.”2 Such an assessment in some ways aptly characterizes the FOX medical drama House, M.D. (hereafter House). The basic features of an episode of House vary little: an opening scene involving characters and settings outside those common to the show begins each episode. These scenes introduce viewers to the case of the week and often feature some sort of misdirection—for instance, it is not the overweight, middle-aged man complaining of chest pains who will become this week’s case, but his apparently healthy wife who will inexplicably collapse. The series’ opening credit sequence rolls, and we return from commercials to find Dr. Gregory House’s diagnostic team beginning their evaluation of the opening’s patient. The remaining minutes of the episode focus on the team’s efforts to identify the patient’s ailment in time to save him or her, embarking upon a series of misdiagnoses along the way. Various interpersonal complications are introduced and addressed throughout the case; typically, they are related to evolving romantic entanglements among the primary cast, although few of these complications are likely to be resolved in one episode. At some point near the end of the episode, House has a conversation—typically with his friend Wilson—about some other matter and becomes suddenly quiet, having just stumbled upon the possible diagnosis evading the team. The condition is caught in time and alleviated (although in some rare cases the team fails to find the diagnosis in time), and the “artificial closure” Sconce notes is achieved.
As a series that chronicles the efforts of a master team of diagnostic doctors to identify and treat the rarest of illnesses, House emphasizes the plot goal of diagnosis in each weekly episode. Where many other series attempt to balance serial and episodic plotlines through a serialized, overarching mystery (Murder One, Burn Notice, Monk), House solves its mystery each week; the exploits of its misanthropic, drug-addicted lead character are what propel serial action instead. The implicit central enigma of its cumulative narrative—or the eight-season total story of House—is whether the series’ eponymous lead can ever be properly civilized. Can House exist without painkillers? Can he cultivate meaningful