Is ‘Empire’ season 3, episode 5 new tonight on Fox? Where things stand at present

The third season of “Empire” to date has certainly been eventful; we don’t know how else you can describe a batch of episodes that includes the sort of chaos that we’ve seen by and large over the course of the past several weeks. There’s been some crazy drama, twists and turns, and at one point, Andre seemingly getting into it with both Nessa and Rhonda at the same exact time. If there’s a word that we would use in order to describe much of what we’ve seen on the show to date, it’d probably be “odd.”

So where does the series go from here? Well, the unfortunate answer is “off the air for the time being.” There is no new episode airing on Fox Wednesday night, with the big reason for that being that there is a Presidential Debate coming on instead. The final showdown between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton is coming starting at around 9:00 p.m. Eastern time, and Fox wants nothing to do with that and to be honest, it’s rather hard to blame them for it. Why in the world would you want to run against that sort of ratings titan?

To make matters worse for “Empire” fans, there’s not a new episode coming on Fox next week, either. This show is off until the end of the World Series, and the earliest it will return to chronicle what is next is Wednesday, November 2 … and it could be even later than that. Depending on what we end up seeing in regards to baseball, it’s theoretically possible that the show will not be back until November 9.

Let’s at least hope that the show continues to be a ratings force during that time, if for no other reason than that it needs to keep most of its ratings now to be considered a smash hit. In general, “Empire” is down about 16% so far in the 18-49 demographic from season 2.