FX has ordered “Kindred,” based on Octavia E. Butler’s science fiction novel, to series.
The pilot was written by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins of “Watchmen,” who will serve as showrunner. Courtney Lee-Mitchell and Darren Aronofsky are also among the executive producers, as are Joe Weisberg and Joel Fields of “The Americans.” Ernestine Walker and Merrilee Heifetz are co-executive producers on the FX Productions series.
Mallori Johnson stars alongside Micah Stock, Ryan Kwanten, Gayle Rankin, Austin Smith, Antoinette Crowe-Legacy and David Alexander Kaplan in the eight-episode series.
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.
“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,” Grad said in a statement. “The pilot directed by Janicza Bravo is brilliant and we can’t wait to resume production with this incredibly talented and dedicated cast.”
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.
Last year, NASA named the landing site of the Perseverance rover on Mars the Octavia E. Butler Landing.