Things have rarely gone smoothly on Fox’s soapy and boisterous Empire, and that now includes its sort-of final episode.

The episode that airs Tuesday at 9 p.m. ET will nominally wrap up Empire’s five-year run, except co-creators Lee Daniels and Danny Strong are waving their arms and saying no, no, wait, don’t turn off the lights yet.

It feels kind of raggedy, which is too bad. Except that’s not the real problem with Empire.

The real problem is that it ran out of ideas a season or two ago. It didn’t run out of adrenalin, so it kept going, but the truth is, Empire stayed at the party too long.

That does not diminish its lifetime achievement, which was becoming a genuine phenomenon at a time when broadcast television really needed one.

Empire debuted in January 2015 by giving us the Lyon family: Lucious (Terrence Howard, top), who was half musical genius and half street thug; Cookie (Taraji P. Henson, top), his larger-than-life wife, who had done 17 years in prison for Lucious’s misdeeds because she refused to rat him out; oldest son Andre (Trai Byers), a business whiz who suffered from bipolar disorder; middle son Jamal (Jussie Smollett), a talented artist who happened to be gay in a world with marginal tolerance; and youngest son Hakeem (Bryshere Y. Gray), whose musical skill was matched by his impulsive and often immature personality.  
The Lyons ran Empire Records, which Lucious and Cookie founded and which had become a major player in the hip-hop world.

One of the many smart moves Daniels and Strong made upfront was hiring Timbaland to create original music, which in the early days was prominently featured in every episode. Not everything was a number-one hit, but it all felt authentic and gave the show visceral energy.

After its premiere, Empire became one of the few shows in TV history to gain viewers every week. It rocketed from about 10 million for its debut to 17.6 million at the end of its first run.

That was very good news. It was also the seeds of the not-so-good news.

A big part of Empire’s appeal was that it burned white-hot, which is almost impossible to sustain. A show built on heat has to keep topping itself, and even then, viewers simply need a break after a while.

Empire remained a well-acted show, with lively characters. But after a couple of seasons, it ran out of things to do with them.

Lucious and Cookie fought, reconciled, divorced, reconnected, fought, divorced. They both had affairs. Andre and Hakeem had multiple girlfriends and wives, a number of whom died. Almost every relationship, romantic and otherwise, involved a scheme and an angle, often lethal. Empire had a high body count.

The scheming was equally intense on the business side. Lucious lost Empire, got it back, lost it again. Cookie formed her own record company, returned to Empire, left, and formed another record company.

The peripheral characters changed, but the plotlines went into reruns some time ago, and that was doubtless one of the significant reasons viewership kept tumbling, to about four million at the end of the fourth season.

It became possible to skip five or six episodes, return, and immediately know what was happening.

This wasn’t the fault of the actors, including supporting players like Cookie’s assistant Becky (Gabourey Sidibe). But one of the side effects of creating larger-than-life characters is that their humanity can get subsumed. Cookie, in particular, often came close to parody.

Like The Sopranos, Empire had its characters constantly pound the theme that “family is everything,” thereby justifying all manner of immoral, illegal, and psychotic behavior in the name of sticking up for blood.

It’s a theme that no doubt resonates with some portion of the audience. Other viewers see the red flag it raises. Either way, we got the point early, and then we got a lot of reiteration.

Empire did a number of things right, beyond the music. Its treatment of Jamal, before Smollett got bounced from the show for a real-life misadventure, was nuanced and instructive. The show had insight into many of the ways the music business works.

It just wore us out.

And it may not be finished.

Empire was initially scheduled to conclude at the end of this season, with episode 20.

But then the coronavirus shut everything down, and Empire couldn’t finish episode 19 or start episode 20. Since no one knows when things could resume, the season finale and maybe series finale will be a slightly retooled episode 18, the one that airs Tuesday.

Both Strong and Daniels, as well as Henson, have declared this unsatisfactory. They hope to film their real envisioned finale once things kick back into gear.

It’s starting to sound a lot like the Walking Dead situation, where the originally planned finale will air all by itself at a later date. While that’s not confirmed for Empire, all the body language is pointing in that direction.

That’s not the worst thing for the network. It can promote the finale as an “event,” possibly stirring up more interest.

Beyond that possibility, there has also been talk of a spinoff featuring Cookie. That might telegraph what’s planned in the finale, but television works in mysterious ways.

Whatever happens, it’s not a big potential spoiler to speculate that whenever Empire ends, Lucious and Cookie will have confirmed, for the umpteenth time, that they really only have eyes for each other.

So maybe all we need to know is this: After all that backstabbing, conniving, misbehaving, and general high-test drama, in the end, we’ve been watching a rom-com.