Good news sci-fi fans! Kindred, the beloved and widely popular sci-fi novel, written by genre icon Ocatvia E. Butler, has been ordered to series by FX.
FX announced the plans for an eight-episode series based on the acclaimed 1979 sci-fi novel on Monday. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Pulitzer prize finalist, playwright, and producer of the 2019 HBO series Watchmen, will serve as show-runner along with Janicza Bravo directing and executive producing the pilot. Bravo is most known for her work directing Zola.
Octavia E. Butler, the first science fiction writer to ever receive the MacArthur fellowship and multiple time Hugo Award Winner, is hailed as being the first black woman to win widespread recognition in the genre. Butler's novel Kindred, remains one of her most successful pieces of work selling over one million copies.
Writer and literary critic Stephen Kearse, wrote about the novel in The New York Times,
"Butler takes time travel, one of speculative fiction’s oldest and most overdone premises, and infuses it with lasting depth and power. Where stories about American slavery are often gratuitous, reducing its horror to explicit violence and brutality, “Kindred” is controlled and precise."
Kindred, which is modeled on slave narratives, centers around Dana, a promising, young black writer living in 1976, who relocates to Los Angeles in hopes of settling into a new life. However, she soon finds herself being pulled back and forth through time between present day and a nineteenth century, Maryland plantation. There, Dana meets her ancestors and is forced to confront antebellum slavery along with family secrets from the past.
According to an FX description of the show,
“An interracial romance threads through her past and present, and the clock is ticking as she struggles to confront the secrets she never knew ran through her blood, in this genre-breaking exploration of the ties that bind.”
Rookie actress, Mallori Johnson will be playing the role of Dana, working alongside stars such as Ryan Kwanten, Micah Stock, Gayle Rankin, Austin Smith, Antoinette Crowe-Legacy, and David Alexander Kaplan.
The series will also include executive producers, Courtney Lee-Mitchell, Ari Handel, Black Swan director Darren Aronofsky, The Americans showrunners Joe Weisberg and Joel Fields, and Ernestine Walker, and Merrilee Heifetz.
President of Original Programming at FX, Nick Grad said of the project,
"Branden Jacobs-Jenkins has done a phenomenal job of adapting Kindred for FX and honoring the legacy and timeless value of Octavia Butler's groundbreaking novel. The pilot directed by Janicza Bravo is brilliant and we can't wait to resume production with this incredibly talented and dedicated cast."
The premiere date of the show has yet to be released.
