"there's the climactic courtroom scene at the heart of nearly every episode, in which the defendant's guilt is clearly established during a withering cross-examination by the DA. The courtroom scene is a TV staple but a real-world anomaly: In real life, defendants almost never take the stand if their cases even get that far, because almost everyone convicted in our criminal justice system is given a sentence without ever actually standing trial. We dispose of more than 90 percent of state and federal criminal cases through plea deals — deals those defendants often take because going to trial can be costly and time-consuming.
An overworked public defender pushing her clients to take plea deals makes for less sexy TV than a noble, dogged prosecutor kneecapping the bad guy on the stand. But the idea that our justice system looks more like the latter — that it is fundamentally fair and works for everyone — has long been passed off on TV as neutral and not as, say, a very specific set of ideological assumptions...
It's worth noting that Empire isn't the only show on TV right now that's absorbing the national story around race and policing — the others just tend to take a very different stance. Last year, while the Eric Garner case was all over the news, Laura Hudson at Slate wrote that CBS's Blue Bloods, in which sentient mustache Tom Selleck plays the head of the NYPD and the patriarch of a family of career police officers, had several storylines that treated issues of race and policing in ways that meant to flatter its older, white audience."
http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/10/02/445045620/empire-nods-to-a-very-different-take-on-policing-than-we-usually-see-in-primetim
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