The pilot episode for a possible TV series based on the late Octavia E. Butler’s Kirkus-starred 1979 time-travel novel, Kindred, is in the works, according to Variety. Playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, who won an Obie Award in 2014 for his plays Appropriate and An Octoroon, will pen the script for the TV network FX, and he’ll executive-produce the show with Joe Weisberg, creator of the FX series The Americans, and director Darren Aronofsky of Black Swan fame, among others.
In the novel, set in California in 1976, a 20-something Black woman named Dana suddenly finds herself transported back to 1819 Maryland, where she sees a young boy drowning in a river; she rescues him and brings him to shore, but then returns to her own time after a man threatens her at gunpoint. It’s later revealed that the boy was her ancestor Rufus, the son of a White slaveowner. Dana is involuntarily brought back in time over and over again, sometimes with her White husband, whenever Rufus’ life is threatened. She encounters terrible injustice and violence during her progressively longer trips into the past, and she fears that she’s “losing my place here in my own time.” In a reference to the work’s SF aspects, Kirkus’ review called the novel a “searing, caustic examination of bizarre and alien practices on the third planet from the sun.”
This is the third TV project based on a work by the Hugo and Nebula Award–winning author to be announced in the last two years. In 2019, Deadline reported that Amazon Prime Video had a TV series in development, based on Butler’s 1980 book Wild Seed, with the involvement of Oscar-winning actor Viola Davis. Last year, Amazon did a deal for a possible series based on the 1987 novel Dawn with Ava DuVernay as a producer, as noted by the Hollywood Reporter.
David Rapp is the senior Indie editor.
