“She really explored every path in the forest,” Jacobs-Jenkins says, noting that Butler shrank down certain characters in later iterations of the book. He was partly inspired to do that after reading Butler’s original drafts of Kindred at her archive at the Huntington Library. He also expands the world of the story, going deeper into the backstory of certain characters that are smaller in scope in the book.
“I set out to make people feel history,” Butler once said. The story is harrowing, a tensile exploration of the horrors of slavery and the psychological steeliness it took to survive. She acclimates to life under enslavement, figuring out how to survive until she’s able to return to her present life in Los Angeles, where she lives with her husband, a white man named Kevin. Released in 1979, Kindred tells the story of Dana, a young Black woman who gets transported back in time to the plantation where her ancestors lived and worked. Jacobs-Jenkins, who first began reading Butler’s work as a kid, thanks to an influential babysitter, immediately thought of Kindred. His agents asked him to think about potential TV adaptations. “Around that time, it was the golden age of television- Breaking Bad, Mad Men,” he recalls.
For Jacobs-Jenkins, a lauded playwright and MacArthur fellow who previously worked on HBO’s Watchmen, the upcoming eight-episode first season has been a dream in the making since 2010. The show, debuting December 13 on Hulu, is created by showrunner, executive producer, and writer Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. It’s also the opening scene for the new teaser for FX’s adaptation of Kindred, available to watch exclusively below. The scene is jarring and propulsive, setting the tone for Kindred, which sees Dana time-traveling back-and-forth between the present and the past. Dana, in spite of the dizzying time travel that brought her there, leaps into action, immediately trying to save his life. Dana, a young Black writer living in Los Angeles in 1976, is transported back in time to a riverbank in Maryland in the early 1800s, where a little white boy is drowning. Octavia Butler’s seismic sci-fi novel Kindred opens with a dark summoning.
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