For Jefferson, that’s intentional. “My goal is to try to make stuff that feels like it’s additive,” he said on a call from his Los Angeles home. “I think that if there’s any connective tissue between [my stories], it’s that they are trying to do something new, help people consider their own lives or consider more deeply the world around them.”

Jefferson has felt this sense of obligation to contemplate our realities throughout his own life. Self-described as “pretty introverted,” he was raised by a white mother, who was an educator and politically a liberal, and a Black father, who was a defense attorney and a Republican. Their Arizona home was filled with, as he described it, “a lot of differing opinions and debate and discussion and healthy argument.” He was encouraged to engage in the same way: to ask questions rather than simply accept what someone tells him.

Jefferson recalled a specific moment in his childhood when, as he planned to head over to a friend’s house for a swim, he caught a glimpse of a news segment his parents were watching about the 1991 Vanity Fair cover featuring a pregnant and nude Demi Moore. Without missing a beat, he said, “Oh my God, that’s so disgusting.”

“I remember my dad and mother interrogating me and not letting me leave until I explained to them why I thought it was gross,” Jefferson said. “And I couldn’t because it was just something that I had picked up off TV. I was pawning it off as my own idea, but I didn’t really understand why people thought it was gross.”

It took, as Jefferson recollected it, 45 minutes of his parents imploring him to think independently to realize that this was an essential part of being a human being. “Things are complex,” he said. “Things are nuanced. The idea that you can look at the world as a binary thing of good people and bad people and good things and bad things is no way to approach life.”

From then on, that’s how Jefferson navigated his journey — to the degree that he became a “devil’s advocate guy” in college at William & Mary in Virginia. “I would guess that 23-year-old Cord Jefferson was probably a nightmare, if I have to be honest,” he said with a laugh. “But as I’ve gotten older, I think that [I’ve] been less of the devil’s advocate-y guy and more just a person who thinks maybe too deeply about everything.”

That’s evident throughout our conversation, as Jefferson pauses to rethink something he has said. Referring to a character in “The Good Place,” he said, “Chidi was very near and dear to my heart, because I frequently find myself hemming and hawing over even the smallest decisions in my life, and spending days and days internally debating the most minor details of my existence.”

Those include the effects of his parents’ divorce when he was 15, navigating white spaces as a biracial Black man, and a persistent anger he said he feels about the world around him. He has been able to confront each of these things by “doing a ton of therapy” and in his diverse work, including the prodigious “Watchmen” episode “This Extraordinary Being,” which earned him an Emmy. The one-hour storyline explored the suppressed trauma of racism and homophobia in a trippy, nostalgic episode with luscious black-and-white cinematography.

The screenplay, co-written by showrunner Damon Lindelof, was “cathartic” for Jefferson. “My childhood was spent in Tucson, which can be a pretty homogenous place,” Jefferson reflected. “I was a Black kid with a funny name in this town where nobody else looked like me or my family and I felt very lonely a lot of the time.”

That frustration only mounted over time, compounded by today’s dismal political landscape. “I think that that’s an emotion that any number of Black people in this country can probably speak to,” Jefferson said. That’s especially so in a Hollywood that, even amid the current cultural shifts, is still marked by white gatekeeping.

“I had a Black friend say to me years ago that in order to be a successful person in this industry and in America, it felt like he was a sociopath,” he said. “Because he was constantly lying about who he was, and the things that he thought, to everybody around him. I still think about him saying that, particularly when it came to [‘This Extraordinary Being’]; how people, including myself, hide their emotions in order to get by, because you don’t want to be considered an angry Black man or an angry Black woman.”

It’s why Jefferson has tried very hard to live without fear of judgment throughout his life and career, first as a journalist and now a cinematic storyteller eager to create his own shows with a new overall deal with Warner Brothers. He’s also helping empower others to do the same with the launch of the Susan M. Haas Fellowship for journalists interested in TV writing. Named after his mother, who died of breast cancer in 2016, the initiative will award two people with the financial and creative support necessary to develop original pilots.

It’s just another way Jefferson seeks to prod others to think — and, in the case of the fellowship, create — outside their own boxes.

“I think that a lot of people have learned to live their lives in a way that will constantly let them avoid fear,” he said. “We should actually be seeking out things that make us afraid all the time, because to me, those are the things that make life worth living.”