FX orders its Kindred adaptation to series

A full series based on Octavia Butler’s Kindred has been ordered at FX. As a MacArthur Fellow and Hugo Award winner, Butler’s influential and time-twisting science fiction novel has been critically hailed for more than four decades.

First published in 1979, Kindred follows Dana, a young Black woman and aspiring writer who uproots her life and relocates to Los Angeles, ready to claim a future that, for once, feels all her own. As she works on settling into her new home, she finds herself being violently pulled back and forth in time to a 19th-century plantation with which she and her family are intimately linked. 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.

Newcomer Mallori Johnson leads the series as Dana, joined by Micah Stock (Bonding), Ryan Kwanten (True Blood), Gayle Rankin (GLOW), Austin Smith (Random Acts Of Flyness), Antoinette Crowe-Legacy (Passing), and David Alexander Kaplan.

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (Watchmen) serves as showrunner and writer, and will executive produce along with Courtney Lee-Mitchell (The Reluctant Fundamentalist), director Darren Aronofsky (Mother!), Ari Handel (One Strange Rock), Joe Weisberg (The Americans), Joel Fields (Fosse/Verdon, The Americans), Ernestine Walker, and Merrilee Heifetz.

The pilot of the eight-episode series was directed and executive produced by Janicza Bravo, known for her work as director and co-writer of A24's Zola.

“I first read Kindred 20 years ago,” Bravo said when the pilot was announced. “I was in college. I hadn’t ever seen myself in a world like that. And certainly not at its center. What might seem like only a portrait of an invisible woman is also a potent embrace of our relationship to history and how it can bring us closer to our future. After what felt like losing over a year of the life I had come to know so well, an opportunity to direct an adaptation of this specific text was a win. On top of that getting to partner with Branden is something I’d been wanting for quite some time.”