FX has ordered a pilot adaptation of Octavia E. Butler’s science fiction novel “Kindred.” The pilot is written by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins of “Watchmen.” Courtney Lee-Mitchell and Darren Aronofsky are also among the executive producers.
Joe Weisberg and Joel Fields of “The Americans” are also executive producers. Ernestine Walker and Merrilee Heifetz are co-executive producers on the FX Productions pilot.
The highly influential “Kindred” was first published in 1979. Lee-Mitchell got the rights in 2008 from Butler’s estate.
FX’s adaptation of “Kindred” is centered on Dana, 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, according to the Disney-owned cable channel. 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 most 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.
“Since my first encounter with the novel nearly two decades ago, there have been few, if any, books and even fewer authors who have meant as much to me as ‘Kindred’ and Octavia Butler,” Jacobs-Jenkins said in a statement on Monday. “It has been the highlight and honor of my career thus far to try and finally bring this timeless story to life – and especially at FX, whose catalogue of bold, thought-provoking, and cutting-edge television has been an endless source of inspiration and delight.”
Jacobs-Jenkins is repped by WME. Lee-Mitchell is repped by Nicole Compas of Ramo Law, and Aronofsky, Weisberg, Fields are repped by CAA. The Butler Estate is represented by Merrilee Heifetz at Writers House LLC. and Hillary Bibicoff of Holmes Weinberg.
Butler, a renowned writer who received a MacArthur “Genius” Grant and PEN West Lifetime Achievement Award for her body of work, also penned best seller “Parable of the Sower.”
She passed away on February 24, 2006.
On Friday, NASA named the landing site of the Perseverance rover on Mars the Octavia E. Butler Landing.