Shadow and Act has learned that FX has officially ordered the adaptation of Octavia Butler’s Kindred to series.
The eight-episode series first got a pilot order last year. Janicza Bravo directed the pilot.
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins will be the showrunner and writer. He executive produces with Courtney Lee-Mitchell, Darren Aronofsky, Ari Handel, Joe Weisberg, Joel Fields, Ernestine Walker and Merrilee Heifetz.
“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.”
The series introduces Mallori Johnson alongside stars Micah Stock, Ryan Kwanten, Gayle Rankin, Austin Smith, Antoinette Crowe-Legacy and David Alexander Kaplan.
Here’s the description:
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.
No word on when the series is set to debut.
