Review: New music business drama ‘Star’ is not cookie-cutter TV

At first glance, “Star,” a music-business drama about an aspiring R&B girl group, seems like a transparent attempt by Fox to replicate the success of the hip-hop soap opera “Empire.” It even shares a co-creator in Lee Daniels.

But “Star” is not exactly cookie-cutter television.

For starters, the series, set amid troubled foster kids, uninsured single mothers, illegally trafficked immigrants and transgender strippers saving for “bottom surgery,” is just about the starkest depiction of life at the economic margins one is likely to find on a broadcast network. Blending high melodrama with unflinching social realism, “Star” feels more like a cross between “Dreamgirls” and “Precious,” Daniels’ 2009 film about an illiterate, chronically abused Harlem teenager, than another version of “Empire.”

And while cautionary tales about the perils of fame are a Hollywood staple, “Star” is something different. It’s less interested in reminding us of the cost of stardom than in the misery that makes people want to flee ordinary existence to seek it out.

For Star (Jude Demorest), who’s just shy of 18 and has spent most of her life cycling through foster families in Pittsburgh, it’s a chance to escape her wretched home life. Street smart and sexually precocious, she’s a female Marshall Mathers, a white girl with an affinity for traditionally black music (and a mixed-race half sister) who is viewed with suspicion by both communities.

After begging her case worker to release her from foster care early, Star does what any aspiring singer would do: She buys a one-way ticket to Harrisburg, telling the clerk the next time she’ll see her will be on the cover of Vanity Fair. Star’s brazen, borderline-delusional confidence isn’t so much a façade as a coping mechanism.

In short order, she tracks down her half-sister, Simone (Brittany O’Grady), whom she hasn’t seen in five years, and stabs Simone’s sexually abusive foster father, leaving him for dead. Now fleeing from the law, the girls head to Atlanta, where they’re joined by the third member of their would-be girl group, Alexandra (Ryan Destiny), a snooty but talented rich girl Star met — where else? — on Instagram. Carlotta (Queen Latifah), a friend of Star and Simone’s late mother, agrees to take the girls in and puts them to work at her hair salon.

Daniels, who co-created the series with playwright Tom Donaghy and directed the first two episodes, is known for his heightened storytelling, and “Star” burns through plot like kindling, sometimes with little regard for plausibility. By the first commercial break, Star has already committed a number of felonies. These whiplash-inducing narrative turns leave precious little space for establishing the central characters and the dynamics between them, and some of the pilot’s biggest moments — especially Simone and Star’s reunion, which should pack an emotional wallop — feel hasty.

Each episode features original music and choreographed song-and-dance numbers, some of which are integrated into the story, others that are presented as fantasy interludes distinct from the main action. While some of the shifts can be jarring, especially given the often-dark subject matter — one minute Simone’s lying in a hospital bed recovering from an overdose, the next she’s dancing in the hallways — they reinforce the idea of fame as a way of transcending circumstance. (The music is also catchy enough that you never really mind the interruption.)

“Star” is not an overtly political show, but it very much speaks to the current moment, playing with expectations about gender, sexuality, race and class in provocative ways. Alexandra is black but rich, looking down on Carlotta and her patrons with their “goat hair” extensions.

Star is poor and white, which, in the aspirational world of American television, makes her rarer than a sentient robot or charismatic serial killer. She’s also extremely aware of how the system has failed her, railing against the caretakers who “used us for free government checks, free babysitting, free sex.”

But her race also confers on Star some advantages. As “a white girl who can sing R&B,” Star is destined for success because, asserts one character, “even the mediocre ones go platinum.”

Like “Atlanta,” Donald Glover’s widely praised FX dramedy, “Star” has a strong sense of place and of the distinct socioeconomic divisions within the black community. “Atlanta is not a good look, darling,” says Alexandra’s stuck-up British mother (played by Naomi Campbell), who begs her daughter to move to London, far from the riffraff of Atlanta. “I’ve seen that housewives show. It’s trash.”

The show is leavened with a good deal of humor, mostly in the form of catty insults destined to be retweeted and turned into GIFs. Like “Empire’s” Cookie Lyon, Star gets many of the best lines on this show (when her foster mother asks how she got a smartphone, Star deadpans: “Obama”). But there’s a brokenness to the character that keeps her from being quite as much fun as Taraji P. Henson’s scene-stealing matriarch.

Part of it has to do with Star’s grimly transactional view of sex. Though still not an adult, she’s long since been trained to use her body as a bargaining chip. At one point she denies having sex with an older married man, saying, “I did not sleep with him, but I am a whore.” It’s a line that will make you laugh, then immediately feel a little uncomfortable about laughing.

Likewise, “Star” works on a superficial level as a story of showbiz dreams, but its power lies in subverting that fantasy.

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‘Star’

Where: Fox

When: 9 p.m. Wednesday

Rating: TV-14-DLSV (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 14 with advisories for suggestive dialogue, coarse language, sex and violence)

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