The creative team likely could have kept things going for however many more years, but Fox made the decision to bring Empire to a close after its upcoming sixth season.
That’ll take Empire over 100 episodes, helping its syndication efforts, but who knows if the characters will live through it all?
Despite its highly lethal plotlines, Empire might have lasted another decade or so on Fox had it not been for the Jussie Smollett controversy at the beginning of the year. The star’s allegedly falsified attack took over news cycles for weeks during the show’s Season 5 hiatus, the narrative mostly eclipsed by real life.