In describing the differences between his “American Horror Story” franchise and “Scream Queens,” which operates in the same genre but with a much brighter palette and much more comedic touch, series creator Ryan Murphy said that making “Scream Queens” had reminded him of the disparate treatment of sex and violence on television.

“We have, you know, had healthy discussions with broadcast standards,” Murphy said at the Television Critics Association press tour in August. “Shockingly, more about the language and the girls having an empowering sense of their own sense of sexuality. I mean, that is the one thing I always find very upsetting, is that violence is cool, for the most part. That’s very easy to get through in my job. It’s language, it’s slang, it’s trying to really reflect how people talk. It’s trying to write characters who are open about their sexuality, who talk about their sexuality that gets the most attention and the most pushback.”

“Empire” showrunner Ilene Chaiken told me in an interview that she found that same disparity disturbing.

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“The idea that you can blow someone’s brains out and show that on television and you can’t see some positive sexual act is confusing,” she said. “These are all the issues of our culture. I find on ‘Empire’ that there is some violence but it’s not predominantly a violent show, so we’re much more dealing in that other world. We’re telling stories about relationships, and sex, and sexuality and figuring out how to say what we need to say.”

Murphy and Chaiken’s comments are a stark reminder of just how often television explores sexuality only in the context of violence, whether characters are investigating sex crimes on a show like “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” or we’re being asked to sympathize with a dangerous obsessive on a show like “Stalker.”

At the press tour, NPR critic Linda Holmes asked the creators of “Wicked City” what they were trying to communicate about Los Angeles in the 1970s by opening the show with a scene of a woman getting murdered by the man on whom she was performing oral sex. Their answers were not precisely illuminating. “It’s really a pastiche of the time,” Amy B. Harris tried to argue, making Holmes’ point for her. “It is about, you know, police officers who are struggling with their own personal issues as well as chasing a killer, you know, a magazine that is sort of a paparazzi magazine where Karen works and Diver runs it, you know, police doing their work. So it’s really, to us, about looking at a world and a time in L.A., and it’s not just about the murders. But the murders are how we sort of open up our world and look at these people in general.”

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Scenes like this make it more difficult for series that show a genuine and sincere interest not just in exploring sexual violence, but in exploring happy, healthy, consensual sexuality, which already faces formidable taboos to make it onto the air. Given how much television sex has little to do with character or story, acting mostly as decoration or enticement, it’s been refreshing to see a crop of television series get serious about sex as a driver of plot and as a crucial part of characters’ personalities.

“We still live in this very prudish culture, and it’s ripe for a story that never gets explored, especially not on broadcast television,” Chaiken said of sexuality in the world of “Empire,” which includes gay and bisexual characters, and presumes a potential for lustiness in characters of all ages and genders. “But it’s something that we spent a lot of time on. It also comes from [series co-creator] Lee [Daniels], who has also explored sexuality a lot in his films, and loves going to those places that make people uncomfortable, or that simply don’t get talked about. When we analyze character, when we talk about characters in stories, we make a point of saying well, what about the sex story? Not are they having sex, or can they, or can we throw a sex scene in there? But that’s part of character, part of being human.”

The result has been a writers’ room that debates everything from sex acts between gay men to whether virginity has any real meaning anymore. “I think we’re missing sex in our entertainment,” Chaiken said of the huge response to “Empire.” “And if we’re going there, it’s great.”

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“You’re The Worst,” the FXX romantic comedy, kicked off its pilot episode with an extended, and even by cable standards fairly explicit, sex scene between its two main characters, writer Jimmy (Chris Geere) and music publicist Gretchen (Aya Cash). As creator Stephen Falk and I discussed, sex was part of a larger plan to characterize Jimmy and Gretchen and other supporting characters on the show as people who really live in their bodies. “We’re also sensualists, and the characters in ‘You’re the Worst’, they’re hedonists,” he told me. “And so they have big appetites for sex, for booze, and for food.”

In an industry that often encourages actors to shrink themselves, creating characters who truly enjoy their bodies is a radical act. And so is suggesting that women don’t simply discard their sexuality at a certain age. “Empire” main character Cookie Lyon (Taraji P. Henson) is defined in part by her sexual hunger. Discussing her role on “Code Black,” the medical drama that premieres on CBS tonight, Marcia Gay Harden, who plays emergency room boss Leane Rorish, said showrunner Michael Seitzman encouraged her not to fall into the trap of believing that a female character could be either sexual or authoritative.

“The other person is younger, and I was worried that I wouldn’t bring sexuality that was important for it, and the other person didn’t have the gravity that I would bring,” Harden said, tearing up while discussing the role. “And I didn’t want her to be an old grandmother, you know. And Michael was, like, ‘Do you know who you like, what you are?’ And it was that stupid, sort of, dysmorphia of self.”

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There are other ways sex and sexuality can be political, too. “Survivor’s Remorse” creator Mike O’Malley said he was inspired by his experience on “Glee,” which depicted the struggles young gay and transgender people experience when they come out, to do something more joyful with the character of Mary-Charles (Erica Ash), the gay sister of rising basketball star Cam Calloway (Jessie Usher) on the show.

“I just wanted there to be this ballsy, authentic, unapologetic woman who was older than a teenage character, who had already been through some of the struggles,” O’Malley said. “I just wanted her to be this very strong, confident woman who was unapologetic about it. And I wanted to show that she had the same sort of eagerness to celebrate who she was and her sexuality.”

Trying to tell great stories about sex and sexual people on television can sometimes feel like planting seeds in a field that’s been sown with salt — doing the same with stories about rape is the equivalent of planting poisoned seeds in concrete. But it’s long past time that television developed a maturity about sex that matched the rhetoric about the medium’s Golden Age.

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