Empire boss: I only needed five more days of shooting to combine the final two episodes into a proper series finale

TheWrap

“It was really shocking and it was hard to accept — and I haven’t really accepted it,” showrunner Brett Mahoney tells The Wrap of ending the series tonight with two episodes left to complete. “We shut down on March 13, but earlier that day, I had come up with a plan. If we could eke out five more days of shooting, I would have pulled forward elements of Episode 20 into Episode 19. ‘Cause we were halfway through 19 and I said listen, ‘If we just have five more days of shooting, I can pull out the elements of the finale and we can still have our series finale and just combine it with 19.' But it ended up not being realistic, we had to put the safety and health of our crew and our cast first. So once it was very clear that we needed to shut down, then it was, how can I craft a finale maintaining the elements that we wanted to get to in our series finale?"