To put it simply, Felicia D. Henderson has the range.

The TV producer-writer-director extraordinaire has spent the last few decades writing jokes for Steve Urkel on the long-running sitcom Family Matters, crafting new diary entries for Mo-to-tha-E-to-tha on Moesha and finessing feminist storylines into episodes of Sister, Sister. For fans of TV nostalgia and aspiring writers, Henderson is the creative genius you want to chat with for hours on end about the Black sitcom heyday of the 1990s.

She is also a premier example of what it looks like to ride Hollywoods ever-bumpy waves and pivot at a perfect inflection point. By 2000, as networks started pulling back from investing in brand-new Black sitcoms, Henderson had landed the top spot as showrunner and executive producer of Soul Food, a Showtime TV follow-up to the 1997 blockbuster hit about the close-knit Joseph family in Chicago. At the time, there had never been a successful television drama centered around a Black family. (CBS shows Under One Roof and City of Angels only lasted one season apiece.) Soul Food was a hit for the network and garnered several NAACP Image Awards during its five-season run.

In the years that followed, Henderson produced episodes of The Punisher, Empire, Fringe, Gossip Girl and Everybody Hates Chris. She was also a writer, director and executive producer for the too-short-lived BET series The Quad, a drama set at the fictional historically Black college Georgia A&M University, in 2017.

Hendersons list of credits may at times seem like a random collection of writing jobs and producer gigs. But a deeper look reveals a keen eye toward stories that center family dynamics and strong Black women who find ways to deal with all of their mess.

Whether its sci-fi or supernatural or action, I love family elements or building a family if one doesnt exist, she told me over video chat in January. Thats a theme probably in all of my work. Family, in my personal life, is everything. And in my creative life, I love writing about family in comedies and dramas and every genre.

Her own lived experience has colored the way she tells stories shes one of six girls, in a family of eight siblings. She grew up loving comic books, and calls herself a researchaholic, ready to dig into whatever is next and be perfectly prepared to face any obstacles. (She has gone back to school twice to make sure her skill set is up to par.) Yet Henderson, 59, says her trajectory in the TV industry had less to do with her own planning and preparation and more to do with entering open doors feeling grateful to be able to do the best job she possibly can. And she takes that approach with young creators coming up behind her, providing a master class in generosity and kindness while keeping her sights on serving audiences in the best way she knows how.

At first glance, seeing Hendersons name attached to a TV series about vampires may seem like another random move. For the past several months, she has been knee deep in pre-production notes for the upcoming Netflix series First Kill , a drama about a teenage vampire who is ready to take her first life when she falls for a slayer whose family, obviously, is against their relationship. So once again, family dynamics are central to the story.

With First Kill, it happens to be vampire-versus-vampire slayer. It happens to be a white family and a Black family, Henderson said. It also happens to be these two young queer girls, and I think about my own queer goddaughter and nieces. They deserve to be represented on television. Its very personal for me.