Wednesday’s episode of “Empire” delivered a bombshell during a tense scene with the always calamitous Lyon family — when Lucious (Terrence Howard) revealed that he, and not his gay son Jamal (Jussie Smollett), was the father of little Lola.
The show, which is headed for a blowout two-hour season finale this Wednesday, knows how to pull its soap-opera punches.
Lucious’ blithely nonchalant behavior is typical of patriarchs in the genre, including “Dallas” baddie JR Ewing (Larry Hagman), who had his own illegitimate son with hussy Vanessa Beaumont.
The illegitimate child and the father who’s not quite there — sometimes literally — is a longstanding trope in narrative drama.
On television, this pattern isn’t always as melodramatic as the events that took place at the Lyon estate.
On the animated Comedy Central series “South Park,” for example, Eric Cartman is the bastard spawn of Liane Cartman — she sleeps around — and a fictitious Denver Broncos player named Jack Tenorman.
“Two and a Half Men” also played it for laughs when it was revealed, after Charlie Sheen’s departure from the show, that one of the skeletons in his character’s (Charlie Harper) closet was his illegitimate daughter: a lesbian named Jennie (Amber Tamblyn), who was also a womanizer, just like her dad.
Usually, a series will milk the hidden-child plot device until the last drop.
On ABC’s now-defunct series “Brothers & Sisters,” the patriarch, William Walker (Tom Skeritt), died at the beginning of the show’s run — and left not one, but two “surprises” for his family, Rebecca (Emily Van Camp) and Ryan (Luke Grimes), both years younger than his children with Nora, his hangdog wife played by Sally Field.
It never failed that once a season, Field (as Nora) would answer the doorbell, only to find another changeling on her doorstep. Being Sally Field, she sobbed enough for an Emmy reel, but always found a place at the table for them.
The new series “Secrets & Lies” makes the hidden child the focus of a murder mystery. Early on we learn that Ben Crawford (Ryan Phillippe), a married house painter with a wandering eye, is the father of the murder victim — a boy that he’s found in the woods near his house. He is also the prime suspect.
ABC’s “Nashville” takes a more mature approach that reflects the changing times. When the show’s middle-aged leading lady Rayna Jaymes (Connie Britton) finally told her broken-down, not-always-sober lifelong love — guitarist Deacon Claybourne (Charles Esten) — that he was the father of her eldest daughter, Maddie (Lennon Stella), all involved parties were horrified.
But Dad and his kid eventually worked out a relationship.
Father knows best?
Not quite — but it’s a start.