March 8, 2021, 4:44pm
Yes, more than four decades on from its original publication, Octavia Butler’s legions of fans will soon be able to watch a prestige television adaptation of the visionary Sci-Fi author’s most beloved novel, and I think I speak for everyone when I say, it’s about damn time.
Deadline today announced that FX has given a pilot order to Kindred, a series based on Butler’s seminal 1979 novel of the same name, which, somehow, has never been adapted for film or TV before.
Playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (a MacArthur fellow, Pulitzer Prize finalist, and consulting producer on HBO’s Watchmen) wrote the Kindred pilot and will also executive produce the show alongside an all-star team of Courtney Lee-Mitchell (The Reluctant Fundamentalist), Darren Aronofsky (Black Swan, The Wrestler), Joe Weisberg (The Americans) and Joel Fields (Fosse/Verdon).
“Since my first encounter with the novel nearly two decades ago, there have been few, if any, books and even fewer authors who have meant as much to me as Kindred and Octavia Butler,” said Jacobs-Jenkins. “It has been the highlight and honor of my career thus far to try and finally bring this timeless story to life.”
No word yet on who’ll play Dana (the young Black writer who gets dragged back and forth in time, from 1970s Los Angeles to a nineteenth-century Maryland plantation) or Rufus (the slaveowner’s son whose life is bound to Dana’s own), but perhaps we’ll don our Dreamcasting hats and try to make our case to Jacobs-Jenkins and Co. while there’s still time.
[via Deadline]