“Most of the time the conflict on the show is about ideas, and frequently those conflicts stoke a lot of passionate debate in the days that follow a broadcast,” he said in the interview, conducted by email. “I understood going in that there would be backlash — some of it thoughtful, some of it less so — but that’s a bad reason not to write something.”

In the episode, Don Keefer, a television news producer, was ordered to find a college student who had started a website designed to allow women to anonymously name the men who raped them. He was told to persuade her to go on live television to confront one of the men she had accused. He found the woman, who argued passionately that the legal system had failed her and so many other rape victims. Don told her that he found her credible and found the accused “sketchy,” but could still not square the idea of naming men accused of rape with his sense of fairness, which he tied to the American judicial system.

To simply accuse the man on television meant no jury and no presentation of evidence, the producer argued. And when Mary, the student, countered that her assailant was innocent until proven guilty only in the legal sense, the producer said he felt “morally obligated” not to name a person who has not formally been charged with a crime. Those words were widely cited in a fusillade of criticism online. One of the show’s writers, Alena Smith, said she was kicked out of the writers’ room after protesting how the plotline was handled.

Emily Nussbaum, the TV critic for The New Yorker, wrote of the producer character: “He argues that the idealistic thing to do is not to believe her story.”

On the Jezebel website, Julianne Escobedo Shepherd wrote, “The most believable aspect of this scenario is that a pompous male journalist would choose to victim-blame a woman who was raped and attempt to justify it with the weak defense that it’s about journalistic ethics.”