Empire's midseason premiere offered a "weird" parallel to the Jussie Smollett case

TVLine

“I don’t know if you’ve been reading the blogs, but it’s been kind of a tough week,” Smollett's Jamal Lyon said on Wednesday's midseason premiere, the first new Empire episode since the actor's hate crime scandal. As Michael Ausiello notes, "pre-scandal, the line would’ve breezed by like a speck of dust. Post scandal, however, the line — and the moment that surrounded it — packed a discomforting punch, the unintentional parallels impossible to ignore." ALSO: Osundairo brothers' lawyer says Smollett's check was for training and the attack.