He is concerned about how H.I.V./AIDS has become a “side story” in conversations within Hollywood and the broader cultural landscape. “I’m still losing people to AIDS,” he said. Through Jamal’s relationship with Kai, the hope is to “normalize” the realities of living with the illness and to take away the stigma.

Outside perspectives were brought in, including from those who are H.I.V. positive and Smollett’s mentor Phill Wilson, the founder of the Black AIDS Institute, an organization Smollett has worked with since he was a teenager. “The writers that we have, everything — our whole team, we can handle this,” he added.

In the 1980s and 1990s, H.I.V./AIDS was a popular topic for writers’ rooms, inspiring Very Special Episodes that often featured fleeting characters who existed solely to destigmatize the disease for everyone else onscreen. (See the “A Different World” episode with the guest star Tisha Campbell as an H.I.V.-positive Hillman College student, or Tony Goldwyn as a gay man dying of AIDS in an episode of “Designing Women.”) As the widespread panic around AIDS dissipated, so did depictions in scripted television, which became fewer and further between in the early 2000s, save for the occasional show like “Queer as Folk.”

With the introduction of Kai, “Empire” joins a handful of TV shows from the last few years that have featured characters who are H.I.V. positive, including the short-lived HBO series “Looking,” Amazon’s “Transparent,” ABC’s “How to Get Away With Murder” and FX’s “Pose.” With the exception of “Pose,” which chronicles the predominantly black and brown queer ballroom scene in New York City during the peak of the AIDS crisis in the late 1980s, these programs are set in the present and try to address the realities of having H.I.V., or of being in a relationship with someone who does. (“I love what “Pose” did,” Smollett said, because “they’re right in the heart of the beginning, and we’re able to tell it in present day.”)