FX adapting Octavia E. Butler’s novel Kindred as a TV series

Kindred, a 1979 novel by science fiction icon Octavia E. Butler, is coming to FX as a TV show.

Octavia E. Butler published Kindred in 1979 and it’s remained popular ever since. It tells the story of Dana, a young Black woman looking to start a career for herself as a writer in Los Angeles who finds herself pulled backwards in time to a Maryland plantation in the pre-Civil War United States, a plantation to which she and her family are powerfully linked.

Butler was mainly a science fiction author, but Kindred transcended the bounds of genre and went on to become a literary classic that’s still popular today. And now, FX is turning it into a TV series starring newcomer Mallori Johnson as Dana. Micah Stock, Ryan Kwanten, Gayle Rankin, Austin Smith, Antoinette Crowe-Legacy and David Alexander Kaplan also star.

The series will have eight episodes. The pilot was directed by Janicza Bravo, who worked on 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.”

And to top it off, Watchmen’s Branden Jacobs-Jenkins will serve as showrunner and writer.

There’s no release date Kindred as of yet, but it’s one to keep an eye on.

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h/t The A.V. Club