While the novel is a fever dream that comes in at under 275 pages, the first season consists of eight hour-long episodes, some of which feel sharper than others.īutler’s dreamy, free-associative style would have lent itself to a more concise form of storytelling. The adaptation of Kindred draws from the soapy tradition, with long pauses and sound effects that are meant to indicate Highly Charged Moment.

Her favorite show is Dynasty, the extraordinarily cheesy 80s soap opera – a clever detail for the new team to drop on. Though her original iteration was a literary writer publishing stories in obscure magazines, Dana is now hoping to break into a Hollywood writers room. Though Kindred was set in the 1970s, the creators moved the contemporary strand of the story to present day, which makes for a smoother watching experience. Kindred, brought to us by showrunner and star playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, and The Americans executive producers Joe Weisberg and Joel Fields, revisits Butler’s story about a modern young woman who must figure out why she keeps slipping back in time. Not surprisingly, a slew of Butler adaptations are in the works, including ones by Issa Rae, JJ Abrams and Ava DuVernay. Parable of the Sower, her 1993 novel about a dystopian future marked by catastrophic droughts and class wars, didn’t light up the bestseller list until the pandemic, when it was belatedly all the rage.

A leader of the Afrofuturism movement, which fused science fiction and racial justice, she turned out books that would gain in relevance and renown in the decades that followed her death from a stroke at age 58 in 2006. Presenting themselves as travelers, with Dana the property of Kevin, the duo spends time in their new realm witnessing the horrors of slavery and helping the residents of the plantation – enslaved and slaveholders alike.īutler was a time traveler in her own way, a MacArthur “genius” whose work presaged the climate crisis and the racial reckoning of recent years. He’s a musician, and a reliable and caring escort to Dana’s subsequent travels to the antebellum south in Kindred, the new FX on Hulu series based on Octavia E Butler’s 1979 classic that married science fiction and contemporary romance, and interrogated the legacy of slavery, and interracial relationships.

Kevin turns out to be a keeper, more romantic than his initial correspondence would suggest.

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