In the 1980s and 1990s, H.I.V./AIDS was a popular topic for writers’ rooms, inspiring Very Special Episodes that often featured fleeting characters who existed solely to destigmatize the disease for everyone else onscreen. “The writers that we have, everything - our whole team, we can handle this,” he added. positive and Smollett’s mentor Phill Wilson, the founder of the Black AIDS Institute, an organization Smollett has worked with since he was a teenager. Outside perspectives were brought in, including from those who are H.I.V. Through Jamal’s relationship with Kai, the hope is to “normalize” the realities of living with the illness and to take away the stigma. “I’m still losing people to AIDS,” he said. He is concerned about how H.I.V./AIDS has become a “side story” in conversations within Hollywood and the broader cultural landscape.
Over the years, plans would “come apart” and “fall away,” he explained, but now, “It was time.” In a recent phone conversation, Smollett said “Empire” had planned to incorporate an H.I.V./AIDS story line since the beginning of the show. She is aghast: “You just going to let him get you sick?” she scolds Jamal, out of Kai’s earshot. Henson) learns about Kai’s status when she visits him at the hospital, where he’s recuperating after having gone missing while reporting a story abroad. And on Wednesday’s episode, Cookie (Taraji P. Episode 4 told, via flashbacks, the evolution of Jamal’s courtship with a journalist, Kai (Toby Onwumere), including Kai’s disclosure about having H.I.V. Three seasons later, “Empire” has invoked H.I.V./AIDS again, but this time, the subject has been finessed into the story, as a way to educate viewers, not to shock them. It was maybe the worst thing a parent could say to a child, and another example of the rottenness of Lucious’s soul.
And the day you die from AIDS, I’mma celebrate.” In Season 2 of “Empire,” Lucious Lyon (Terrence Howard), the vindictive, ruthless music mogul, delivered a blistering statement to his gay son, Jamal (Jussie Smollett): “You ain’t nothing to me but a disappointment.
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