I love that we’re at a place where an esteemed white male creator talks about what he’s learned from an esteemed black female creator. I’d love to get to a place where a black female creator is making an HBO drama series herself.

MORRISThat’s funny, because I got a load of Ms. King’s cornrows on that show and thought, “Who in Jarden, Tex., is doing her hair?” That’s a detail six people would query. But it does get to an element of authenticity that Ms. Rhimes and her collaborators have mastered and that speaks to the value of having people of color at every stage of a production, beyond the writers’ room and directors. “The Leftovers” had a black woman, played by Amanda Warren, as mayor of the New York hamlet where the first season was set. How did she get there? Who voted for her? Did the other characters know she was black? Did she? That character landed in the canyon between what you observe, Jim, as colorblind casting and casting that’s color aware. People of color are aware of seeing themselves and can see when someone’s been blind to color.

But whether he thought he’d miscast Ms. Warren (whose acting wasn’t a problem), Mr. Lindelof kept going and hired Ms. King, who did some of her best acting on this show. He didn’t stop there, though. He hired a handful of other black actors to explore some weird, otherworldly, grisly stuff: Darius McCrary, as a fortune teller; the veteran Steven Williams as the hoodooing father-in-law of Ms. King’s character; and Kevin Carroll, as her husband.

With Mr. Carroll’s firefighter, the show was especially daring. Here was a black man prone to unexplained outbursts of violence that rhymed with the trauma of the show’s main protagonist, a white cop, played by Justin Theroux. These two were soul mates who didn’t understand that violence had cosmically drawn them to each other. Not everything Mr. Carroll was asked to do worked, not because he was black but because some of the character’s moves were false. But that’s entertainment.

I don’t want to credit Ms. Rhimes for Mr. Lindelof’s risk-taking — he was already a gambler. But I do think when it comes to freeing actors of color to be bad, her influence is inevitable. Before “Empire,” her shows were among TV’s most nuts. And they had black people and Latinos and gay men at peak sociopath. On that front, “Empire” has already shattered her monopoly. I don’t know whether she feels Cookie and company breathing down her neck, but I’ve noticed an uptick in the insanity in Shondaland.

I think people saw what Ms. Rhimes was getting away with and wanted to see whether they could, too. That, to me, has led to so many complicated depictions of, say, black men on television shows with integrated casts: on “The Knick” and “Jessica Jones” and “Fargo” and the underwhelming “Ballers” and “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” and “Hit the Floor” (Jim, are you watching this?) and all of those shows with “American” and “Crime” in the title. This goes to your plurality point: The more, the merrier — and less “problematic.” Popular culture has always struggled with how much its nonwhite protagonists can be anything other than saints. But television is comfortable at last with diversifying its galaxy of sinners.