I met Logan two months ago, on set, two weeks before shooting wrapped and four before Los Angeles announced a shelter-in-place order. “Penny Dreadful: City of Angels” had taken over Melody Ranch, an arid century-old studio in the Santa Clarita Valley. Before leading me on a tour of the outdoor sets and soundstages, Logan, an elfin presence with a demeanor that splits the difference between fanatical and very nice, greeted me at his office in a repurposed hacienda. He had kitted out the room with Hitchcock posters and “Murder She Wrote” memorabilia. Behind a leather couch stood a large map, maybe six feet by four feet, showing Los Angeles County in 1938.

Last summer, just ahead of shooting, he sat his principal cast in front of that map and pulled down a plastic overlay. That afternoon, he pulled it down for me, too.

“Here,” he said, “you’ll love this.”

The overlay showed how the coming freeway system, drawn on the plastic in blood-red lines, sliced through some poor communities and isolated others. “What the freeway system became was essentially a way of creating quarantine zones in Los Angeles,” he said.

Logan, a screenwriter and a Tony-winning playwright, drives these freeways every day. He loves the system — the cloverleafs, the underpasses. “I mean, is it brutalist? Yes, it is,” he said. “But there’s also something aesthetically beautiful about it.” After the 2016 election, he began to wonder about how those freeways were made and how they had formed and deformed the city.

Los Angeles, which has largely effaced its Mexican past, likes to pretend it doesn’t have much history. A city full of aspirants who came in search of new names and new noses, it prefers to tear down and rebuild, bigger and shinier.