"There will be just as many gasp-worthy moments. But if I could repeat the first season in any way, I would say not that we burned through story too fast, but that sometimes we didn't track characters. We jumped ahead to serve a plot point occasionally, and we let go of a great opportunity to tell some great stories."
As an example, she cited how Anika Calhoun (Grace Gealey) betrays her traitorous fiancee, Lucious Lyon (Terrence Howard), dumping him and walking over to rival record company Creedmor.
"There was a lot of talking about 'How did that happen?', 'They burned through story too fast', 'They jumped through that', 'I wanted to know that'," Chaiken said. "And I acknowledge that we did it because we were just trying to tell this story, we just loved the story so much. So we're just taking the time to stay with our characters in their evolution."
Part of what's helped with that is a bigger writers' room, "because we're doing 18 episodes and wanted at some point to be able to break the room up so we could move through story breaking and not get behind," Chaiken said. The larger staff (which is majority African-American) also adds "a lot of diversity in terms of age and cultural experience," as well as perspective, which can be helpful when it comes to debating the complex sexual politics of Empire.
"Sometimes we laugh with glee because we know that many of the people who work in TV just don't have these conversations, don't think about sex in the ways that we do," Chaiken said of her relationship with series creator Lee Daniels.
"But then our writers' room is really diverse in that way, and we have great debates where we have people who are much more conservative. Writers who have said things that make my skin crawl, because that's some old-school thinking about homosexuality there, but we welcome that debate, and all those points of view get represented in characters. ... And even when it's not about homosexuality, it's just people's attitudes about sex, about fidelity, rules of behaviour, rules of engagement with sex, are really just fraught."
In terms of character arcs, Chaiken said she looked forward to going deeper into Andre Lyon's (Trai Byers) bipolar disorder and the way it affected his marriage to Rhonda (Kaitlin Doubleday) and his relationship to Lucious, who has always been less interested in Andre because he is not a musician.
"Andre and Rhonda are having a baby. Bipolar is one of the most heritable illnesses. They have to deal with that and consider the possibility and ramifications of it, and we deal with it on other stories as well," Chaiken said. "It's a big deal for Andre and it's a big deal for us in the story. Andre's been devalued by his own father and yet his father ... as so often happens with men like Lucious, they look more to the grandchildren than to their own children. Their children are rife with issues for them, and they invest their grandchildren with all of their fantasies."
Jamal Lyon (Jussie Smollett), who ended the first season of Empire in control of his father's company after Lucious was arrested on suspicion of murder, will have to grapple with the balance between business and art.
"Jamal is an artist, and at this point in his life, more purely an artist," Chaiken said. "And it's going to kind of frustrate and challenge him, especially while his father's in prison and he has all of the responsibilities. That should be an area of conflict."
And Hakeem Lyon (Bryshere Y. Gray), who shares his father's talents as a rapper, has to recover after learning that this affinity is not enough to win him control of his father's business.
"We're also telling a story for Hakeem about what that loss means and how he's going to fight back from it," Chaiken said. "Hakeem has a huge growth arc in this season. A real exciting process of maturing, becoming a man, and discovering that in his nature, he's actually more mogul than Jamal, which he wouldn't have been and he certainly wasn't ready for in the first season. He's going to face some adversity in season two, and he's going to build some skills." And Lucious himself will have to deal with his fall from the top of the business world and his incarceration.
"You can imagine that Lucious Lyon in prison is still a god, he's still revered, and probably even more so by the population that surrounds him. But at the same time, he's a prisoner and someone who's being deprived of his rights while his case is being adjudicated. We find that ... to be rich story turf," she said.
What: Empire
When and where: TV2 at 9.40pm, tonight.
- additional reporting Bloomberg
