Ilene Chaiken wears many hats from producer, director, writer, and finally founder of Little Chicken Productions. She co-created, wrote and executive produced the lesbian-centered Showtime drama The L Word. Chaiken's partner is LouAnne Brickhouse, vice president for production of The Walt Disney Company, and has two daughters from her previous relationship.
Last year, she executive-produced the huge hit Empire for Fox. Windy City called Ilene to discuss the second season of Empire with a group of reporters.
Question: Hi, Ilene. I'm calling from Chicago and a LGBT publication. Now after working on The L Word and Empire, can you talk about the importance of having real LGBT characters portrayed on these shows?
Ilene Chaiken: Oh, it's hugely important to us. I think that it's hugely important just period, on the face of it, to reflect the world, to have diversity, to tell these stories. They still are LGBT stories and stories of other groups of people who have been previously marginalized and not represented in the popular culture. Hugely important, important to me, important to the medium, important in the world at large.
It's also, personally, very important to me, very important to Lee Daniels and to Danny Strong, and when they first talked to me about Empire, they told me that Jamal's story and this story about homophobia in the Black community was one of the most compelling and important stories to them. It's, in a sense, what the show is about.
Q: Debbie Allen directed one of the episodes in the first season. What needs to be done to increase the opportunity for women of color to direct more?
IC: What needs to be done is exactly what we're doing on Empire. We need to make certain that we have more women of color directing episodes of television, more diversity among the writers and directors of many television shows. There's no denying that it's a problem, and I think that everybody who's in a position to make the change needs to take some responsibility. I know that we are on Empire and we're doing it for all the right reasons. Most importantly, because it makes our show better.
Q: Are you worried about the sophomore slump?
IC: I think it doesn't serve us to think about it. What we've done is proceeded to do the very best we can to tell great stories. We love the show. We love the stories we told in season one. We certainly don't feel like we're out of story. We love these characters and we're going to go on doing what we've been doing and continuing to tell the stories of their lives. We haven't changed the show. It's the show that the audience loved in the first season, but it's more and, I hope, even better.
Q: What can we expect with the music this season?
IC: The music in season two is going to be all that and more. We were really excited by the music that was created for the show in the first season. Timbaland is back, and his team—[including] Jim Beanz, who works with him—they're creating a lot of songs for the show. What I've heard has been spectacular. If anything, we've stepped up our game and we also have some additional songwriters and music producers working on the show, including Ne-Yo, J.R. Rotem and Swizz Beatz. We've got some incredible music in season two.
We also have a couple of new characters, who are musical characters in the show, who are performers and who are making music for the show. Tiana is back and then we've introduced a couple of new Empire artists and you'll hear just more music and a somewhat broader array of musical styles within the genre of Empire.
Q: On the season premiere, the show touches on issues about incarceration. How does Empire handle social issues?
IC: We talk about it a lot. The show is nuanced and the characters are complex and, sometimes, twisted. We think that's pretty real, pretty true to life. The show is set in a world in which those issues are very present in the lives of these characters, and it's what we do; i's what Lee Daniels does, and what Danny Strong does in all of the work that they do.
So, the show is permeated with those kinds of themes. And I believe that, for example, Cookie, on the one hand, knows that it's a ruse, that there's a certain lack of sincerity in the specific thing that she's doing. Yet, I think she firmly believes everything she says and believes it passionately, and Cookie is a character who's able to live with that contradiction.
Q: Taraji P. Henson is winning awards and getting a lot of the recognition for this show.
IC: She can, in a matter of moments, go from the most raucous and flamboyant performance to the most heart-warming and touching is what makes her such an extraordinary actress.
Q: Why do you think her character connects with people?
IC: I think that it's, in part, that she has this incredible range of emotions that are accessible, that really hooks people in and makes us feel. I also think that it's because this character hasn't been on television before, and the audiences are just loving seeing a character that they haven't seen before who's so empowered, who's so outspoken, who's so unbridled and uncensored. I know, as a woman, that I've looked for that character and longed for that character, but I get that men are loving her as much as women are.
Q: How is splitting up the brothers on the show affecting the writing?
IC: In order to create a good season of television, people need to change. We look at an arc of the season and there's a period of time in this season when various characters are estranged from other characters and the story of how they overcome their estrangements or how they battle through the estrangement is part of the joy of the show. When we conceived this season and made the choice to create those dynamics, we said to ourselves, "But, we have to make sure that there are multiple scenarios in which we get to put them together in the ways we love them together."
Jamal and Hakeem do perform together. They do in the first episode and they will again and repeatedly throughout the show. In episode four there's a very big set piece in which Jamal and Hakeem work together. I won't spoil it for you and tell you what it is, but it happens repeatedly, and also, when push comes to shove, these boys have one another's backs. The brothers come through for one another in big and very heart-warming ways in key moments in the season.
Q: Any crazy fan stories since Empire premiered?
IC: I think my experience with the fans is most likely not as crazy as the experiences that the cast has with the fan, because they're beloved, and when they walk out in public, they feel the love in many ways. But my personal experience is simple—the experience that I would cite is screening the episodes in a large theater with a big audience, and that's happened twice. It happened last year. We screened our two-part season finale at a theater downtown in Los Angeles, and the other day when we screened our premiere at Carnegie Hall. And the experience of standing in an audience and hearing people screaming and shouting and calling back to the characters onscreen is fabulous and crazy.
Watch Empire at 8 p.m. on Wednesdays on Fox.
