During the "Masters of Sex" panel at the Television Critics Association press tour on Aug.11, the show's producers were forced to defend the addition of fictional children to Season 3.

The series is based off of the lives of sex researchers Bill Masters, played by Michael Sheen, and Virginia Johnson, played by Lizzy Caplan. While the show stuck to the truth for the first two seasons, the addition of a fictional third child for both Masters and Johnson, who only had two children each in real life, has fans confused about the direction the show is taking, reported TV Guide.

"We are telling a nonfiction story and one where there are people who are still alive out there in the world, and those people need to be protected, and that is the way of protecting them," said producer Michelle Ashford. "We were advised to add children to protect the people that are still alive. It wasn't a storytelling prerogative; it had to do with protecting living people."

Ashford, who previously defended the show's focus on the kids at the start of the season, was joined by executive producer Sarah Timberman, who supported Ashford's statement.

"It gave us license to tell stories about fictional characters," said Timberman. "We want to be respectful of people who are living, yet it was fertile territory for Michelle and the other writers to look at what the experience would be, being a teenage child of one of the most famed sex researchers."

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Ashford explained before the start of Season 3 that creators were thrown a curve ball when they were contacted with legal concerns.

"We were presented with an astronomical legal hurdle this year that I can't really speak to, except to say that there were certain things that had to be done in our storytelling that had to do with legal issues," she said.

This forced producers to explore and create storylines that weren't originally planned but that could still be part of the overall arc of the show.

"But we made lemonade out of lemons," continued Ashford. "We feel like we've dealt with it at the very beginning of the season, and now we're moving on and getting back to our story."

"Masters of Sex" airs Sundays at 10 p.m. on Showtime and was recently renewed for a fourth season.