Fox’s hit series “Empire” ended its glorious first season with the show's seriously flawed head honcho Lucious Lyon (Terrence Howard), a drug dealer-turned-music mogul, heading off for some serious jail time.

Spoilers Guide reports that when the series resumes in September, the CEO of Empire Entertainment will still be in prison, and, according to Showrunner Ilene Chaiken, “he will be a busy little jailbird.” The Taraji P. Henson-led show will also be playing around with its timeline, jumping between the first two seasons.

For Chaiken, the 57-year-old producer and director who saw early success as the screenwriter for the 1996 Pamela Anderson action flick “Barb Wire,” Season 1 of "Empire" has been an utterly gratifying experience.

Speaking with Variety days before the season finale, Chaiken gushed: “The sense of mission and joy we’ve had about doing this show was really apparent to me from the moment we went to work.”

Noting the level of passion and conviction people on the show had since its inception, Chaiken remarks that: “Every member of (the cast and crew) has loved working on this show like they’ve never loved anything else, adding that: “We were all dedicated to the mission of making this show great.”

Much of the pride in what “Empire” has been able to accomplish has come from being able to spotlight the black-oriented storylines in a major prime time way. Chaiken says that it was the material “that drew everyone together,” and that it “was important to the cast to be telling these stories about the African-American community in an authentic way.”

“Even if we couldn’t exactly articulate it at the time, there was the sense that we were doing something that hadn’t been done before,” Chaiken said.

Season 2 of “Empire” airs Sept. 23 on Fox.