Kindred premieres Dec. 13 on FX.
Octavia E. Butler’s 1979 novel Kindred is an original story that has maddeningly withstood live-action adaptation. A sci-fi tale about a contemporary young Black woman who spontaneously travels back to the Antebellum south to experience the institution of slavery and misogyny first-hand remains a modern classic. And now it’s an eight-episode FX series from playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins that is more loosely based, and inspired by Butler’s Kindred than a direct adaptation. Adding plots, character points of view, and non-linear storytelling to the mix, Kindred the series is creative but it loses the focus and grace of Butler’s prose and intentions.
Butler’s novel takes place in 1976, but showrunner Jacobs-Jenkins has set this series in 2016 Los Angeles to reflect current race and gender relations. Dana James (Mallori Johnson) is a New Yorker who has recently moved to SoCal to pursue writing for television. Using the money from the sale of the Brownstone her grandmother left her, Dana has splurged on a small home and the equipment needed to pursue her new career. An orphan since her mentally ill mother, Olivia, disappeared when she was young, Dana’s aunt fills the maternal void but is judgemental about Dana’s choices and questions her mental stability. All of this sets the stage for the start of Dana having nightmares that place her in the 19th century as a slave on a Maryland plantation.
Initially, Dana experiences these nightmares as terrifying snippets that look like sleepwalking episodes. When she starts dating Kevin Franklin (Micah Stock), a sweet waiter who vibes with her, he too gets to witness her frightening reactions to “waking up.” Wanting to blame the move and stress, Dana gets scared as her jumps have her spending more time in the past, even while it only seems like minutes in real time. While in the past, she has to navigate life as a slave without freedom of movement, while experiencing what seems like a time loop of saving the plantation owner’s disaster prone young son, Rufus (David Alexander Kaplan). But the true purpose of Dana’s time travel becomes more clear when she meets an unexpected relative by the end of the pilot.
The best episodes of the season are the initial two, “Dana” and “Sabina,” written by Jacobs-Jenkins. His contemporary take on Dana, as a single woman who is implied to be relatively aimless up to now, is a relatable one to late-age Millennials and Gen Zers who are struggling to get a foothold on their futures. And then placing Dana in a suburban neighborhood full of nosy white suburban Karens distrustful of this young Black woman creates a heightened sense of outside eyes and ears putting even more pressure on Dana to conform and fit into social, economic, and racial norms. It’s only with Kevin that Dana starts to thaw, but theirs is a new interracial relationship that is still entirely fragile to cultural mistakes on Kevin’s part and the baggage they both bring into the romance.
To frame Dana and Kevin as new lovers is a strange departure from Butler’s book where the pair are portrayed as a committed, married interracial couple. That is a more solid foundation in which to anchor the high-concept premise, and makes it plausible that book Dana’s incredible dilemma is one that Kevin would believe and spur him to fight for his wife’s safety. In the series, their new attraction begs the question of why this guy would believe her and not just peace out? It’s a logic flaw that’s ultimately “solved” by the fates which conscript Kevin into Dana’s time traveling nightmare too. While she tries to escape violent male overseers and opportunistic peers, Kevin gets to experience plantation life as white man who is relatively quickly embraced by the slave-owning histrionic Weylin family (Ryan Kwanten and Gayle Rankin). From their respective social standings, they try to weather their longer trips into the past and discover why Dana thinks they’re there in the first place.
The series also suffers from its efforts to expand the characters and plots of the book to fill the needs of a television series. While Butler told Kindred through Dana’s point of view, Jacobs-Jenkins opens up the storytelling to let us spend time with others like Kevin, Kevin’s sister, and Dana’s aunt and uncle (in the present), specific slaves on the property and even flashbacks of Dana’s mother’s history. Bifurcating the plot certainly spreads the story wealth around amongst the ensemble, but what’s lost is the singular experience of going through this journey from Dana’s perspective. That’s especially a shame because Mallori Johnson is arguably the best thing about this adaptation, and her talented shoulders could have amply carried this series.
The most successful element of this adaptation is Mallori Johnson’s compelling performance.
There’s also a tacked-on mystery to the show that doesn’t work that well. A bookended first and last episode tries to connect nonlinear sequences introduced into the pilot with revelations in the season finale that don’t provide satisfying answers or progression to that additional story. In fact, it leaves the series on a cliffhanger that doesn’t feel earned or urgent enough to make us want to go back to the atrocities of the slavery past. While Jacobs-Jenkins can be commended for not feeling beholden to tell Kindred exactly as Butler did, the changes he makes undercut its sense of momentum and focus in the overall season. There’s also a sense that the most poignant and thought-provoking themes that Butler addresses in her book are given short shrift in exchange for that mystery that just isn’t as dynamic.
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