FX has officially given a series order to the television adaptation of Octavia Butler’s book, Kindred.
As previously reported by The Root, the series was given a pilot order last March and began production on it back in September with Zola director Janicza Bravo at the helm. Now, per Deadline, that same pilot has graduated into a full blown series which means we’ll be seeing a full season with eight episodes of this TV adaptation on our small screens relatively soon.
Written by Watchmen’s Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, who also serves as the series showrunner, Kindred the series, will tell the story of “Dana (played by Julliard School grad and newcomer Mallori Johnson), a young Black woman and aspiring writer who has uprooted her life of familial obligation and relocated to Los Angeles, ready to claim a future that, for once, feels all her own. But, before she can get settled into her new home, she finds herself being violently pulled back and forth in time to a nineteenth-century plantation with which she and her family are surprisingly and 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, in this genre-breaking exploration of the ties that bind.”
Following the news, FX President of Original Programming Nick Grad expressed: “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.”
Bravo previously added, “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.”