But then there came that one insomnia-ridden night in February when, adrift on Netflix, I clicked on the pilot episode. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Kyle Chandler’s coach Eric had the weight of the world on the shoulders of his blue coach’s jacket and Connie Britton, who plays his magnificent wife, Tami, had this unicorn’s tail for hair and suddenly the quarterback was in the hospital and there was this guy Riggins who had these humongous shoulders and he blamed himself for the accident and he didn’t appear to have any parents and Explosions in the Sky was playing in the background…

Rihanna. It would just be… delicious. It would be very juicy and delicious. She probably smells like brown sugar… like one of those sugar candy sticks… wow.

I’m glad that relationship is there. It is, even in the most naive mind, a sin of omission that we have not looked at this side of people raising their children in other television shows, and having some cultural resonance other than that of white Americans. It’s something that we have to see more often, the relationship of a brown man and his son. Because historically, that’s not how it began in this country for brown families who didn’t have the freedom of their own will and volition, let alone the ability to hold their families together.

I’m trying to create a world where there’s no racism, there’s no sexism, there’s no homophobia. And I know it’s not real life, but I kinda don’t care. I’d like to create a world where none of that matters, you have the supernatural creatures for that to work as an analogy. In my mind if you can create a world like that on tv, maybe life starts to imitate it. That’s important to me. I think there are other shows that are better equipped to deal with serious topics. We’re doing werewolves in high school.