FX orders its Kindred adaptation to series
The series, based on Octavia E. Butler's bestselling time-travel novel, comes from Watchmen's Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
Aux News Kindred
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.”
12 Comments
And here I thought they were rebooting Kindred: The Embraced.
Same. Not that we need more vampire bullshit, but still.
I always confuse Butler’s Kindred with her Fledgling, which is vampire bullshit.
That show was the original “vampire bullshit”./hyperbole
So the whole “1979” part just breezed unimpeded through your noggin.
I thought it was The Kindred, the low budget horror film from 1987
Same here, well based on the title anyway. Mind you from what I remember the 90s show was basically just a U.S. style soap opera but with vampires, at least compared to the games.Isnt there another VtM series planned anyway?.
Zola is great, but Bravo’s Lemon still has my heart. This is going to be amazing.
This book is so good. Like a lot of Butlers work a lot of the prose is the interior thoughts of the characters as they weigh the terrible choices they have to make. It will be interesting to see how they do it. (Also, in the book Dana is not a newcomer to Los Angeles. She and her husband are moving into a new house from an apartment in a different part of LA when the weirdness begins).
I never saw the movie (or read this book), but was Antebellum a straight up rip-off of Kindred’s plot? Kinda sounds like it.The movie seemed lame, but I’ll probably check out the show.
Kinda, but not really. It’s shit, by the way – skip it.
Hopefully this will be great: the novel deserves no less.Antebellum always struck me as a shitty Kindred rip off.