Of all of Octavia Butler’s works, Kindred may be her most enduring. Published quietly by Doubleday in 1979, the novel follows a modern-day writer named Dana living in Los Angeles, cycling through shitty manual-labor jobs (much like Butler herself), and working on her fiction until she’s thrust into an inexplicable nightmare. Transported against her will to a plantation in antebellum Maryland, Dana learns she must save the life of one of her ancestors, a white slave owner named Rufus, over and over. Whenever Rufus, who is just a child when they meet, is in danger, Dana is yanked backward; whenever she believes her life is about to end, she returns to the present. This blend of genres that Butler called a “grim fantasy” allowed her to test contemporary sensibilities against historical realities: Could she have done what her Black ancestors did in order to survive?
This mix of fantasy and historical fiction that frightened publishers 40 years ago is now one of the industry’s go-to tropes, and after years of pale imitations, Kindred finally comes to the screen. Since its publication, the adaptation rights to the novel have passed through hands as disparate as Russell Simmons and Lynn Nottage. In 2015, the playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins got in touch with Courtney Lee-Mitchell, the most recent rights holder, and convinced her that Kindred needed to be a TV show. “The book is asking you to wrestle with the feeling of being trapped, the feeling of waiting, what it’s like to spend time with people and develop attachments and relationships to them,” Jacobs-Jenkins explains. “I don’t think you could’ve done that in a shorter form.”
Jacobs-Jenkins’s Kindred (all eight episodes are streaming on FX on Hulu today) does not attempt a strict textual adaptation. While writing the scripts, he scoured the many drafts of the novel in Butler’s archive at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, to explore possible avenues; he wanted to transmute the same discomfort Butler had communicated back then to a contemporary audience today, including the interracial marriage between Dana and a white man, Kevin. He knows purists will have their gripes (in the series, Dana and Kevin are not married and instead meet onscreen) and welcomes the conversation. “If you believe that your job is to replace the book, I think you somehow failed,” he said. “My favorite adaptations drive you back to the book, and that’s the spirit of what we wanted to do. If you felt the need to wrestle with our text, go back to the original source, and let’s have a conversation there.”
Butler herself likely would have approved. “If a Kindred movie is ever made, I wouldn’t be involved,” she wrote in a letter responding to questions from an 11th-grade class in 2000. “It won’t be my movie, and I suspect it won’t look much like my book. Movies don’t usually look much like the books they’re taken from, do they?”
How did you come to this adaptation?
I’ve been a gigantic Octavia Butler devotee since I was 13. I was really into Ray Bradbury, and I had a babysitter who was like, “You should read Octavia Butler,” and brought me her copies of the trade paperbacks of the Patternist series — now collectible editions. I devoured them. It was the first time I’d ever seen brown people on the cover of a book like this.
Around the time my theater career was taking off and television was emerging as a space very friendly to theater artists, my agent said to me, “Think about a thing you’d want to pitch for television.” I was 26 years old and had just moved to Berlin, and I had reread Kindred for the third time. I said, “I want to make Kindred into a TV show.” I began to pitch it, and of course, no one (a) knew who Octavia Butler was, (b) cared about this book, or (c) thought it was in any way a makeable show, but I kept bringing it up at every general meeting I had.
I wound up in a meeting with Protozoa Pictures with Josh Stern. He tracked down Courtney Lee-Mitchell, who had the rights to the book and was trying to make a film out of it. I was like, “You’ve got to get me into a lunch with this woman. I have to convince her this is a TV show.” That was the beginning of the development process in 2015. When we came out to Los Angeles to pitch it around, the majority of people responded as I imagined they would, which was, “Okay, no thank you.” It’s a show with a Black female lead that talks very directly about historical chattel slavery, which most people in Hollywood were and still are allergic to. We’ve been developing it for almost seven years. It was a struggle, but ironically, one of the great pleasures of developing this is Octavia Butler mainstreamed in the last three or four years.
Out of all her works, Kindred has been optioned the most, but it never got made. Even upon its publication in 1979, CBS was interested in turning it into a made-for-TV movie.
That’s funny. At one point, Russell Simmons had it. Talia Shire had the rights for a really long time and then, ironically enough, her son was in our writers’ room. Also Lynn Nottage and her husband, Tony Gerber — she was like, “One of the first jobs we got out of grad school was adapting Kindred.” It’s gone through so many amazing hands.
Why do you think it’s been batted around for so long but not made until now?
It didn’t scream commercial enough for the industry. People were afraid of the subject matter. People really undervalued its readership and fan base. And racism. Racism is a thing we’ve all seemingly come to terms with — or implicit bias, rather. That’s a nice way to say it.
People didn’t think of it as a television property, and that’s actually the key. The book is asking you to wrestle with the feeling of being trapped, the feeling of waiting, what it’s like to spend time with people and develop attachments and relationships to them. I don’t think you could’ve done that in a shorter form.
If the process started seven years ago, was there a point when the culture changed so much that Hollywood was like, Oh, we do need to do this?
June 2020 was an interesting month for this project. It was like I woke up one day and we were having a different conversation about it. Meanwhile, I’m living in constant fear two blocks from Barclays Center. But something shifted. She was in the air. Everyone was like, Oh, she predicted Trump in the Parable books. There was also a moment when those Game of Thrones guys announced they were making that show.
Oh, Confederate?
Yeah. And Roxane Gay wrote, “Why didn’t they just make Kindred?” And suddenly everyone was like, Wait, what’s this book Kindred? By that point, we were set up at FX. There were little moments all throughout the last four or five years where it felt like the world was catching up to the book, whereas ten years ago in my little apartment in Berlin, I would have to pay people to listen to me get to the end of a description of it.
As someone who has read all her works, why Kindred versus any of the others, like Parable of the Sower or Wild Seed?
Even Octavia Butler felt that Kindred had the most crossover appeal. Her other books are hard sci-fi — space operas and spaceships. They’re living in the shadow of a genre that a lot of people don’t feel is “their thing.” Kindred is not classic sci-fi; it’s fantasy. She’s written an allegory, a psychologically gothic romance in the vein of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Ironically, this book becomes a gateway for speculative fiction, which is its own amazing part of our literary heritage.
Most canonical literature that deals with the history of American chattel slavery doesn’t dare ask us to weigh our contemporary ethics and morals against that period. It treats that period almost anthropologically, like it’s sealed in a globe and we’re experiencing it as this removed artifact. But the genius of Kindred, and something that people haven’t figured out how to do again, is a contemporary person — who we are going to identify with almost automatically — forced to reckon with their own assumptions or senses of superiority against the history they think they know.
There’s also just a perennial American obsession with genetics: What makes someone Black or white or not? And this is the story of a woman who discovers she has surprising ancestry. That’s the truth of our contemporary reality. I think about Rachel Dolezal; there’s a really amazing article Jelani Cobb wrote where he says, “Rachel Dolezal is calling everyone on a bluff about the fictions of race and Blackness and whiteness.” This book is steering directly into the center of that supernova. But it’s very readable, it appeals to young readers. I love that it’s Dolly Parton’s favorite book that no one has heard of.
It feels like it should be as canonical as To Kill a Mockingbird, especially considering how easily it reads.
Totally, but Kindred always felt like a discovery because it wasn’t The Great Gatsby, but when you discovered it, you’re like, Man, this book’s really good. And people forget that it’s almost 50 years old. It’s as old as Gravity’s Rainbow or Song of Solomon. It was back there with those classics but feels contemporary, and that’s a really special power of it.
Who did you work with from the Octavia Butler estate for the project?
Her agent, Merrilee Heifetz, has been one of the most profound advocates for the show and a resource for us from the beginning. She gave us access to Octavia’s papers at the Huntington Library early on, and the archive has been an amazing resource for the writers’ room and a sounding board for me as I tried to do my initial work of processing and unpacking the text.
What was helpful from the archives in terms of thinking about the television adaptation?
I read through a lot of Butler’s drafts for Kindred because, in some ways, she was still writing this book at the time she was teaching herself how to write novels. She was so devoted to her craft. She went down every path in the forest and turned around and went down again. I tried very hard to make sure that every decision we made for the series, which we do update, was in the grain of her thinking or inspired by a choice she’d made in a draft or two and backed away from. In some ways, I felt like our task was to expand the universe of the book, and those drafts were instrumental in giving us permission.
Was there anything in there that became a foundational text?
There was something about learning she had conceived of Kindred originally as a part of the Patternist series, that somehow Dana was one of the Doro descendants. That drew my attention to the choice to make Dana an orphan. I was really fixated on why she made that choice, and someone told me she was thinking about Superman, who was also an orphan. Once I realized she had this impulse — because the Patternist series is ultimately a prolonged obsession with genetics — she was oddly stumbling her way into a conversation on epigenetics, which would in turn make this an actual piece of science fiction.
Throughout her work — from the Patternist novels to the Xenogenesis series through to her last book, Fledgling — she is fascinated with genetics.
Oh, totally. Eugenics, basically. It’s the dirty secret of the work or what people don’t want to talk about. Everyone’s always like, Oh, it’s about survival, but no, she’s interested in breeding and pedigree and how race as a construct becomes a weapon in that conversation. She reportedly felt that she never quite cracked Kindred, and I always felt like Fledgling was her bizarro, upside-down version of Kindred thematically.
Fledgling is all about a Black vampire descended from white vampires. Shori is a product of a species that is predatory and maybe in some ways parasitic. They’re vampires who also dabble in eugenics and cross-breeding. And a lot of it is about Shori’s desirability to all these various people, which is an interesting sublimation of Dana: this loner artist type who seems to attract the love of her life by being sleepy at work. Even the idea of beauty isn’t going to come into the conversation; it’s just that she’s a gifted young Black heroine who’s remarkable, and that’s enough to make her attractive to everyone. And of course, in Kindred, everyone is in love with Dana by the end.
They’re obsessed with her.
That’s the most interesting thing about her long-term relationship with Rufus and one of the darker questions of the book: What is his attraction to her? Where does it begin, and where does it end?
Where do you think Butler’s obsession with genetics comes from?
Well, if you’re a Black person or an African American descended from slaves, you’re always thinking about genetics. Your ancestors were bought and sold, and their teeth were checked, and your female ancestors were treated like livestock and bred for economic gain. That’s a thing in your life. I don’t know if I feel it’s such a gigantic leap in terms of her fascination with it. Ultimately, there’s a humanist concern she’s trying to prove in the face of a very dehumanizing social practice. But she wasn’t someone who kept a diary in that way, so I could never get to the bottom of it. She was also obsessed with how things change over time, and that’s a part of how things collapse and rebuild themselves. What’s that quote? “Change is …”?
God.
Exactly. She wants to track how things are changing. In a way, that’s what early biology was all about: these monks growing beans and learning about genes.
What do you make of the films that seem like imitations of Kindred, like Antebellum or Alice?
I have to be honest, I didn’t see any of them. I heard about them, and people would say things, but whether it’s imitation or homage, I can’t tell you. It’s also work that’s existing in the shadow of Get Out, which allowed these big studios to think about how this interesting work might actually make money. But everyone’s a fan of Octavia Butler, and they’re lying if they say they aren’t. I know Janelle Monáe is a huge fan of Octavia Butler; she’s talked about it. I’m sure she must have been in some ways partly aware of how her film was in conversation with the work.
Even from the pilot, I could see there were a lot of deviations from the published work. Of course, there are textual purists who believe adaptations should be absolutely faithful. Did the drafts free you from that thinking?
Yeah. I do a lot of adaptations in theater. I treat it like, What is this object, and what is it trying to be? What was it trying to be then, and what does it want to be now? Merrilee was like, “Octavia would want you to make the thing for now.” I took that to heart because it was very easy to make a Queen’s Gambit–style history piece set in the ’70s and everyone’s in bell-bottoms, but I wanted to make the thing that would resonate in the way she intended her contemporary audience to feel.
And she was doing very discomforting things to her audiences in the ’70s. I wanted to find the echoes of that for now. It’s been interesting to think about how far we are from Loving v. Virginia, but at that time, to represent an interracial relationship was still quite radical and insane. In this moment, it’s accepted that you’re supposed to root for them no matter what, that somehow it’s distasteful to root against that couple. And I was like, Man, that’s not dangerous enough for me. I want to put pressure on these people in the way Octavia was putting pressure on them in their marriage in the ’70s.
Is that why you decided to make Kevin a new love interest as opposed to her husband?
Yeah, the thing people don’t remember about the book is that Kevin is not very likable up top. He’s very severe looking. She says he presents as frightening and is telling her to be his typist. He’s ten years older than her, and there’s an interesting patriarchal energy. He’s not a Prince Charming in the book at all.
Well, none of her men ever are.
Structurally, the book itself is asking you to understand why they actually love each other and see each other as kindred spirits — that it’s not superficial but it’s about a deeper understanding of another person. I didn’t want people to feel safe about their marriage. I didn’t want people to feel that they had to root for it or didn’t have to root for it. I wanted them to be with these two people in the present tense as they fall in love, whatever that looks like. There are three things I think superfans will balk at, but I’m only asking that they be patient and see the long game.