When Fox's Empire premiered in the winter of 2015, it was a phenomenon that television hadn't seen: an all-black cast and a gay protagonist on a network prime-time drama that people watched in record numbers. This was a year before NBC's This Is Us became a ratings juggernaut, when network TV was thought dead, a victim of an onslaught of streaming services and competing content. Empire captured a moment in the zeitgeist.

While the show's breakout was Taraji P. Henson, in her instantly iconic role as the matron of the Lyon family, Cookie, Jamal Lyon (Jussie Smollett) also struck a cultural chord. As an openly gay black man, he was able to be a part of story lines that were rarely, if ever, seen on network television. In one of Empire's most famous (or infamous) scenes, Jamal recalls his father Lucious (Terrence Howard) dumping him in a trash can as a kid after he catches Jamal in women's clothing. This scene was inspired by series creator Lee Daniels' own childhood.

“When I was 5, my earliest memory was walking down the stairs in my mother’s red high-heel shoes, and my dad, he’s a cop, is down playing cards with the boys and it was not pretty—at all," Daniels said during a 2014 lecture at Ohio State University. "He put me in a trash can and he said that I would never be nothing. He said, ‘You already have it bad, boy, 'cause you’re black—now you’re a faggot, too.'"

On Empire, Jamal confronted homophobia within his own family, within the black community, and within the music industry, all the while giving us the occasional bop. The first season's music remains its best, particularly "You're So Beautiful," a song Jamal uses to come out publicly, to Lucious' chagrin.

"You're So Beautiful" won the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Contemporary Song in 2016, the same year Smollett won Best New Artist. It was something of a coronation: Jamal/Jussie as poster child for black gay America—whether we needed one or not. The revolution was already well under way with Moonlight ushering in a new era of black, queer storytelling that fall; it would go on to win the Best Picture Oscar the following year.

But Empire's days on top were brief, as it succumbed to more and more outlandish plot twists, Jamal faded more into the background, and diverse queer representation on television exploded. Jamal, who once seemed so groundbreaking, quickly became passé compared to Eric from Netflix's Sex Education, Rue from HBO's Euphoria, or the entire cast of FX's Pose. These are queer people of color at the forefront of their own stories, often with the support of QPOC behind the camera.

Jamal, however, is owed a debt of gratitude. He helped Eric, Rue, Pray Tell, Blanca, and Co. shanté through that door and stay. As for Smollett… well, that's just a hot mess, the fallout from which we're still grappling with. In the end, producers decided to give Jamal a happy, if trite, ending, not killing him off like some may have expected given Smollett's own unseemly actions. According to Vulture:

As was very briefly mentioned during the show’s season premiere, Jamal and his fiancé decided to move to London to escape the Lyon family’s near-constant petty drama, in the hopes of restarting their lives [...] Jamal’s mother, Cookie (Taraji P. Henson), is the relayer of such intel, telling a pal the details during a night in of pampering. “No wonder that boy ran off to London,” Cookie joked, gesturing to her pink onesie. “Please don’t get me started. I miss him so much.”

I'll miss him, too, I guess, though it's grown increasingly harder to separate Jussie from Jamal. But Jamal was essentially good, and often the moral center of the Lyon family. Perhaps he deserves that happy London ending, especially since the fate of his real-life counterpart promises to be less idyllic.