When Does Empire Season 7 Come Out? Is It Renewed?

What is Empire about?

Cookie Lyon is the reason to watch Empire, and Taraji P. Henson knows it. She plays the ex-wife who did twelve years in prison while her husband Lucious built a hip-hop empire on her back, and she walks into that world in the pilot demanding everything she's owed. The show is built around a King Lear-style succession battle, with Lucious maneuvering his three very different sons against each other while Cookie refuses to be maneuvered at all. It is loud, soapy, and completely unashamed of either quality.

Lee Daniels directs the pilot with the kind of maximalist energy that the show sustains, for better or worse, across its run. Empire arrived at a moment when network television was hungry for primetime soap and hungry for Black storytelling at scale, and it delivered both at once. The music, mostly original hip-hop and R&B, is woven into the plot rather than dropped in decoratively, which gives the show a texture that similar family dramas lack. It also helped that Henson and Terrence Howard, despite their well-publicized off-screen tensions, generate genuine friction on screen.

Season one was a cultural event. Ratings climbed week over week, which almost never happens for network dramas, and the show dominated social media in a way that felt like a throwback to appointment television. Critics responded warmly, particularly to Henson. The later seasons drew more skepticism as storylines grew more convoluted and a real-world scandal involving Jussie Smollett, who played a fourth main character, forced the show to write his character out awkwardly. The quality dip was noticeable and the audience followed.

At its best, Empire is essentially a fantasy, a show where a Black woman who was written off walks back in and refuses to shrink. That idea, carried by Henson's performance, never entirely loses its charge even when the writing around it goes slack.

Created by Danny Strong, Lee Daniels

Is Empire renewed or cancelled?

Why did Empire end?

Empire's ratings story is one of the most dramatic rises and falls in recent network television history. When it premiered in January 2015, it became a cultural phenomenon almost overnight, with viewership climbing week over week through its first season in a way that almost never happens in the streaming era. At its peak it was pulling in more than 17 million viewers. By the time the sixth and final season aired in 2019 and 2020, that number had collapsed to well under two million. That kind of decline makes renewal decisions easy, and FOX quietly let the show wind down rather than commit to more.

The departure of Jussie Smollett, who played Jamal Lyon, added a real complication. After the events surrounding him in early 2019, the show wrote his character out, and it never quite recovered the ensemble chemistry that had made the first couple of seasons work. Whether that accelerated the ratings slide or was simply one more problem on top of an already struggling show is hard to say, but it did not help.

FOX and the producers apparently agreed to give Empire a proper final season rather than cancel it outright, though even that last run was shortened when COVID-19 production shutdowns hit in early 2020, cutting the season from 20 episodes to 18. So the show did get an ending, just a compressed one. Six seasons and 102 episodes is a respectable run for any drama, and given where the ratings were, there was no real argument for continuing further.

Empire Season 7 Release Date

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