Timbaland Will Be the Music Guru on Fox's Hip Hop Show

Joining a project that gets increasingly more interesting, Timbaland has boarded Empire—a Fox drama pilot from Lee Daniels—as songwriter and song producer.

Joining a project that gets increasingly more interesting, Timbaland has boarded Empire—a Fox drama pilot from Lee Daniels—as songwriter and song producer. According to Nellie Andreeva of Deadline, the show will include "new and existing music." 

As Andreeva points out, Timbaland's role resembles the one previously held by T Bone Burnett, another high-profile music producer, on ABC's Nashville. And that's good news. The first season of Nashville was kept exciting thanks to fantastic music choices on Burnett's part. The less great news is that Burnett left before the second season after some behind the scenes drama, and the show's sounds just haven't been the same.

It's not just Timbaland (real name: Timothy Mosley) that makes the Fox pilot about a family running a hip hop, well, empire interesting. It comes from director Lee Daniels and writer/actor Danny Strong, who collaborated on The Butler, and stars Terrence Howard and Taraji P. Henson.  In all likelihood, it's going to series. If it sounds like something that belongs on cable more than Fox, that's the plan as the network tries to move beyond the pilot season model.