Some television creators aim to provide audiences with an escape from the stresses of living in a tumultuous world. Others want to tap into those anxieties.

The latter certainly applies to the creators behind Netflix‘s The Beast in Me, Death by Lightning, Monster: The Ed Gein Story, and Black Rabbit. The shows tackle stories about murder, deceit, grief, familial estrangement, presidential assassinations, and complex mental health diagnoses — and all have found captive audiences on the streamer over the last year. During a conversation at Netflix & Deadline Present: The Visionaries, the mind behind these series opened up about grappling with some of the complicated, unpleasant questions and themes permeating society.

Watch the video conversation here and scroll down for more photos from the event.

“Loss was absolutely on the Post-It on my computer. I mean it really was, and I think one of the great things about writing is getting to work through these very universal questions,” Howard Gordon, creator and showrunner of The Beast in Me, said. “Also it sort of collided with the societal kind of finger pointing that we seem to be in this moment of not accepting squarely our own stories.”

Despite taking place more than 100 years earlier, Mike Makowsky’s Death by Lightning also has some surprisingly current throughlines. The series, based on the book Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President, follows the “strange but true” assassination of former President James Garfield, “who I guarantee probably most of you in this room didn’t even know he’d been assassinated until this second,” joked Makowsky.

When he first picked up Candice Millard’s nonfiction title, he says he was struck by how the parallel structure between Garfield and his eventual assassin Charles J. Guiteau “just had so much to say about mental illness but also about political violence and the perils of hero worship and chasing fame.”

“The book felt utterly contemporary to me,” he added.

Ian Brennan also took a look at the parallels between the past and present with Monster: The Ed Gein Story, which explores the life and motivations of one of the most notorious murderers and grave robbers in American history.

Brennan explained that explorations of society’s associations with mental health, both broadly in the aftermath of World War II and specifically Gein’s own struggles with schizophrenia, were top of mind when penning the script.

“It’s actually something that felt actually quite pressing, but thrown into this mid-century sort of Capote landscape of complete isolation and a changing century,” he said. “Before Ed Gein, before the horrors of the Holocaust came out, what we thought were monsters were was literally like the Phantom of the Opera, Dracula and the Wolfman. After Auschwitz, that all changed. The monster became us, and Ed Gein was stuck squarely in the middle of that.”

Howard Gordon, Ian Brennan, Mike Makowsky, Kate Sussman and Zach Baylin

Thomas Lynch for Netflix

Howard Gordon and Ian Brennan

Thomas Lynch for Netflix

Kate Susman and Mike Makowsky

Thomas Lynch for Netflix

Zach Baylin

Thomas Lynch for Netflix

While none of these creators are keen to shy away from harsh truths, they also understand the realities of making television. The No. 1 rule, of course, is to keep audiences engaged, which on shows like these requires a precise tonal balance. Audiences should feel somewhat anxious watching, but not so much so that it becomes unbearable to sustain over a longer runtime.

“You couldn’t watch Uncut Gems for eight hours, because you’d, like, tear your hair out, right?” quipped Black Rabbit‘s Kate Susman. “That movie was very inspirational to us, [but] we kind of knew in the beginning, everyone will throw up if you have to watch that for eight hours.”

Black Rabbit follows Jude Law as a rising-star restaurateur who forced into New York’s criminal underworld when his chaotic brother, played by Jason Bateman, returns to town with loan sharks on his trail.

Based just on that sentence alone, there’s obviously plenty of strife to mine from in that story. Susman and her writing and producing partner Zach Baylin wanted to see how far they could take it.

“We’d never worked in TV before. Our experience is in film,” Baylin said. “Our instinct was to try and capture a bit of that anxiety of what it feels like to be in New York, just at any time of trying to run to make the subway, to get to your work, to see if the delivery of the restaurant was there, then to realize you’re in debt, and your secrets are starting to spill out, and just kind of to try to see how far you could actually keep your foot on the gas through the course of eight hours, and whether that was sustainable. We just didn’t want there to be a moment where there was much breathing room, and that was sort of that was an idea that we went in with from the from the beginning.”