Octavia Butler’s Classic Sci-Fi ‘Kindred’ is Now on Hulu
FX brings Octavia Butler’s genre-breaking exploration of the ties that bind to the small screen. Kindred debuts today.
The acclaimed and best-selling novel was first published in 1979. It’s widely regarded as one of the greatest science fiction novels. In it, Dana James is diverted between her Los Angeles home in 1976 and a pre-Civil War tobacco plantation. She meets her ancestors: a Black freewoman and a white planter who has forced her into slavery. As Dana’s visits to the past become longer, she becomes entangled in the plantation community and has to make hard choices in order to survive slavery so that she can return to her own time.
The adaptation moves from 1976 to modern times, but Dana’s journey through time and the challenges she faces remain. The trailer jumps back and forth between the plantation and the present-day – and how things have and haven’t changed in two hundred years.
Kindred Cast & Details
Kindred stars Mallori Johnson as Dana James, as well as Micah Stock, Ryan Kwanten, Gayle Rankin, Austin Smith, David Alexander Kaplan, Sophina Brown, and Sheria Irving. The eight-episode season is helmed by showrunner Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, who also wrote the adaptation. Darren Aronofsky is one of the show’s producers.
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. 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. The clock is ticking as she struggles to confront secrets she never knew ran through her blood.
Kindred is available on Hulu today.
