Empire Season 5? In an interview with Deadline, EP Ilene Chaiken teases the Season 4 “reset” that will eventually, all being well, lead to a fifth season renewal for the FOX drama:
DEADLINE: So, you’ve said this finale would be a reset. So are we going into Empire 2.0 now?
CHAIKEN: I never called it Empire 2.0, but in the [writers’] room we do talk about Lucious 2.0, so I guess you are right on point with us. If we are talking about Lucious 2.0, than I think it is fair to say its now Empire 2.0.
DEADLINE: Fueling that, will Lucious’ apparent memory loss last over the season or be dealt with pretty quickly in Season 4?
CHAIKEN: I don’t want to go too deep into this because of course this is story for us in Season 4 and I’m not going to give any of it away. But suffice to say that Lucious in Season 4 is going to be dealing with the aftermath of this event, the damage to his mind and his body. Whether or not his memory is permanently or just temporally impaired is certainly one of the questions we’d begin the new season with.
Who is Lucious now? What is he dealing with? How has it affected him? How has it changed him? And how has does effect every member of his family depending what the answers to those questions are. That is a big part of our story in Season 4 and that is a real reset. I’ve done serialized drama before…
On how the time-slot shift from 9PM to 8PM will impact Empire‘s Season 5 ambitions:
Nobody has said to us that we need to soften or pull back on anything at 8 o’clock. I’m betting it is no going to change the nature of what Empire is one iota — I feel like our job is to tell these stories and make the show, and the network’s job is to program and promote it and all of that. We trust that they know what they are doing.
Empire Season 4 premieres Wednesday at 8PM this fall.
Stay tuned as we continue to monitor the renew/cancel status of Empire Season 5…
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