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Time travel, enslavement, and mystery are central to FX/Hulu’s latest series. Kindred, based on the acclaimed book, is getting the TV treatment. The series was written by Watchmen writer/producer and playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. He also serves as showrunner and executive producer on the series.

Here’s everything we know about Kindred.

Mallori Johnson as Dana James with a tear down her face in 'Kindred'
Mallori Johnson as Dana James in ‘Kindred’ | FX/ Hulu

‘Kindred’ is based on the beloved book by Octavia Butler

Science fiction writer Octavia Butler’s most beloved Kindred is coming to the small-screen in a limited series for FX. The series will follow Dana James, a Black woman and a writer who shockingly finds herself being pulled back and forth from the present into the antebellum period.

As she tries to escape enslavement, she also grapples with her interracial relationship and violence in her own family. Newcomer Mallori Johnson will portray Dana in her breakout role.

The series will have eight episodes

The TV show will run for a total of eight episodes for Season 1. The series stars newcomer Mallori Johnson, Micah Stock, Ryan Kwanten, Gayle Rankin, Austin Smith, David Alexander Kaplan, Sophina Brown, and Sheria Irving.

The official description for the series reads,

Adapted from the celebrated novel Kindred, by Hugo Award-winner Octavia E. Butler, the FX series centers on “Dana James” (Mallori 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 settle into her new home, she finds herself being violently pulled back and forth in time. She emerges at a nineteenth-century plantation, a place remarkably and intimately linked with Dana and her family. An interracial romance threads through Dana’s past and present, and the clock is ticking as she struggles to confront secrets she never knew ran through her blood, in this genre-breaking exploration of the ties that bind.

‘Zola’ director Janicza Bravo directed the ‘Kindred’ pilot

Like many people, Butler’s work has been monumental to Bravo. “I first read Kindred 20 years ago,” she told Deadline via Shadow and Act. “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.”

Several films have had the same concept as Kindred in recent years, including Alice starring Keke Palmer, and Antebellum, starring Janelle Monae. Still, watching the series straight from the source will be interesting.

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