FX has given a series order to Kindred, based on the award-winning novel by Octavia E. Butler. Season one will consist of eight episodes and has Mallori Johnson, Micah Stock, Ryan Kwanten, Gayle Rankin, Austin Smith, Antoinette Crowe-Legacy, and David Alexander Kaplan on board to star.
Janicza Bravo (Zola) directed the pilot and writer/executive producer Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is guiding the series as showrunner.
“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,” said Nick Grad, President, Original Programming FX. “The pilot directed by Janicza Bravo is brilliant and we can’t wait to resume production with this incredibly talented and dedicated cast.”
Courtney Lee-Mitchell (The Reluctant Fundamentalist), Darren Aronofsky (mother!) and Ari Handel (One Strange Rock) of Protozoa Pictures, Joe Weisberg (The Americans), Joel Fields (Fosse/Verdon), Ernestine Walker, and Merrilee Heifetz are involved as executive producers.
FX released the following description of Kindred:
“FX’s adaptation of Kindred is centered on ‘Dana’ (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.”
