Branden Jacobs

The award-winning playwright's determination birthed the beautiful and terrifying FX adaptation of Butler's magnum opus.

Playwright and producer Branden Jacobs–Jenkins welcomed two babies into the world during the Covid pandemic. One was his now sunny and vivacious toddler. The other, far more finicky, seedling he’d nurtured for a decade—the television adaptation of Octavia Butler's groundbreaking time-travel novel Kindred.

The series, like the novel, weaves history and the fantasy of time travel together, plunging a modern, middle-class Black woman into the nightmare of a working plantation, where her status is gray, and her goal in essence is to aid a key member of a very troubled and oppressive slave-owning family. Dana James's situation is further complicated by her romantic relationship with a white man who also gets dragged into this nightmare journey. Unbidden time travel, yanking back and forth between the past and the present, is a twisted and insightful metaphor for the enduring and traumatic inheritance of American chattel slavery. One of the reasons the novel is beloved and the series so successful is that its premise allows for an exceptional blend of depth and adrenaline-inflected storytelling.

As a result, Butler's novel now occupies a prominent role in American literary history. Though it was optioned for screen since its publication in 1979, it took more than four decades for that idea to become a reality.

Though previous interpretations of Butler's work include an opera and a graphic novel, and no less than four other projects are in development for film and television, including one led by Ava DuVernay, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's FX production is the first screen adaptation to make it to fruition. There are many reasons for that accomplishment. An elite artistic pedigree certainly helps, but much of his credits were gathered along the way. The two-time Obie-winning playwright, whose subversive, innovative works (Appropriate and An Octoroon) engage with race, class, and American history, likens his pursuit of Butler's canonical novel to the Pequod Captain's pursuit of the whale Moby Dick—a goal of long-standing obsession. All told, Jacobs-Jenkins acknowledges that he spent "about a decade of my life trying to make this happen." Fair enough. Yet, for a professor who has taught writing and performance studies at University of Texas, NYU, and now Yale, the metaphor is still a tad imprecise. In Melville's 1851 saga, the captain loses his leg to the whale and becomes consumed with finding him and taking his revenge. Spoiler alert: The quest does not end well for Ahab.

The writer's pursuit, on the other hand, has a far happier ending. Kindred, a dream project, became his first time at the TV helm.

I sat down by video call with this prodigiously talented, 30-something winner of both Guggenheim (2020) and MacArthur (2016) fellowships. Even with the greatest dedication and awards under your belt, the development process is daunting. Jacobs-Jenkins developed and sold the project and lined up the producing partners, shepherding the concept from page to screen. When the series premiered December 13 on Hulu, the credits were dotted throughout with his name. While he served as consulting producer on HBO's successful adaptation Watchmen, this time, his roles are multiple and more central: executive producer, showrunner, writer. Those credits could read "visionary."

Befitting his multi-hyphenate ambitions, the artist's focus is unrelenting. The journey began in earnest when he reread Kindred in 2010 and fixed his sights on bringing it to TV. A self-described "nobody young writer" living in Berlin, he started just figuring out how the process worked and tracking the rights.

Dozens of meetings met with lukewarm response. Still, when Protozoa Pictures’ director of development asked him, "What is the thing you always want to do that no one lets you do?" he did not blink: "I want to make Kindred." And after years of meh and rejection, someone finally said: "Okay, that's interesting."

Fortuitously, Protozoa founder and Academy Award–nominated director Darren Aronofsky (Black Swan) was looking for a time travel project, and the team had seen Jacobs-Jenkins's play Gloria, a 2016 Pulitzer Prize finalist for drama. Though he worked more closely with others in the company, the similarities were striking. Both Aronofsky and Jacobs-Jenkins were Ivy League grads with an interest in anthropology and an affinity for surrealistic and psychological works and speculative fiction. Both are also New York–based, which was especially handy in development when Jacobs-Jenkins worked closely with Aronofsky's producing partner, Ari Handel.

Protozoa set up a meeting between the writer and and Courtney Lee-Mitchell, who held the rights to the novel. By that stage, in 2016, it was like "finally meeting the Godfather."

Despite having hopes for a movie, over the course of the lunch, she was convinced enough to let them try for TV. They sold it to FX in October that same year. It took another four years to get through development.

In 2020, just as FX finally said yes to ordering the pilot, there was Covid-19 to contend with. As if ushering your dream project into the world during a pandemic weren't daunting enough, Jacobs-Jenkins steered the writer's room from his Brooklyn home over Zoom, beginning when his daughter was just two weeks old. Stretched thin even with a committed coparent, production did not skip a beat: "I wasn't sleeping, but I was on them every day to make the show happen."

Filming began in April 2022 and wrapped in September. Three months later, the show hit the screen. Kindred is a significant achievement, a clever and creative translation of an already brilliant novel, faithful enough to please fans but very much its own creature.

A key part of that success was pinpointing the right creative partners. During the writing and production, it was essential to have people in the room who understood Butler's social and artistic sensibilities and the nuances and precarious nature of Dana's identity in this situation. The team was diverse in every conceivable way, and Black women were especially crucial. Janicza Bravo directed the Kindred pilot fresh off the success of the headline-making black comedy Zola. Joining her and executive producer Lee-Mitchell were directors Ayoka Chenzira (Queen Sugar) and Destiny Ekaragha (Ted Lass0), writer Joy Kecken (The Wire), and story editor Zenzele Price (We Crashed).

It's also easy to see and hear the threads between Jacobs-Jenkins's own very consciously cultivated childhood and this adaptation. As an African American man raised in a Black feminist household, he brought his own strongly held sensibilities and sensitivities to the production. Raised by a Harvard Law graduate turned entrepreneur and a dentist father who worked in the prison system, young Jacobs-Jenkins enjoyed the enviable experience of being nurtured by adults who encouraged him intellectually and creatively. It was his attentive babysitter who noticed an affinity for speculative fiction and first introduced him to Butler. Growing up on the D.C. side of Takoma Park, his curriculum was steeped in Afrocentric thought, with frequent visits to feminist bookstores like Sister Space.

Upon his father's urging, he traveled to Berlin, where much of the thinking about the book took even deeper root. He also did a scholarly project on the intersections of race, comedy, and melancholia, inspired by his father's dentistry work in prisons. Using the Lomax archive's recordings of prisoners’ work songs, he traced their influence through pop culture in the 20th century, "thinking about culture being built on this sort of invisible Black labor."

Jacobs-Jenkins remembers "being very young and taken to see Angela Davis speak at an event and having [her] wanted poster signed." You can draw a line between the Black women on-screen in Kindred and those he was exposed to early in life—women he describes as "powerful women without apology or without questioning," His mother was also a collector of Black memorabilia, and he grew up surrounded by history, books, and images "of fearlessness when it came to talking through or confronting the ideas of our history and our past."

Those inheritances show up in the fierce merger of melancholy, history, and irreverent, subversive humor on screen and in the work that he undertook before a single frame was shot. Jacobs-Jenkins also combed Butler's archives, determined to find "why she wrote it, how she wrote it, how she arrived at the choices she made," and the exploration and depth of thought blew him away. Draft upon draft,"[Butler] went down every path in the forest."

The final product reflects clear ideas about the art and science of adaptation, with one principle—that it shouldn't try to replace its source material. Rather, "the best version of something sends you back to the original. It makes you think about it slightly differently or opens it up for deeper understanding." The playwright turned TV producer hopes that this production will do that for Butler fans and new readers.

This approach was forged in part by its creator's formative experience working on The Watchmen. As Jacobs-Jenkins recalls fondly, producer Damon Lindelof was clear: Rather than recreating the graphic novel, "we’re gonna do the sequel." While Jacobs-Jenkins forged a different strategy, focusing on the first third of the novel, that statement stuck and it gave rise to an insight. "Audiences are going to be fine if they're not seeing their dream version of something that they love to come to life," he says. In fact, "they’ll never be happy in that way." If mimicry is inherently unsatisfying, "you have to give them a different way to relate to the thing they love." Rather than imitation, he seeks impact: "The greatest honor you could give to the author is to try to create a similar effect in your context to what they were attempting to do in theirs."

It's fascinating to hear the intention match up with the end product. That's what I did as I watched, flipping back between the screen and my Kindle app. The production retains the essential elements of the novel but with its own distinctive structure and story arc and a stellar cast led by Mallori Johnson as Dana and Micah Stock playing her waiter-musician love interest with subtle charm and bewilderment.

Deeply evocative of mood and emotion, its effect and showrunner's ruminations recall what I’d recently heard the astute horror writer Stephen Barnes say at an event about the elicitation of emotion as a central driver of genre–that the difference between horror and a thriller with supernatural elements is the primary emotion the book seeks to elicit from its audience. For thrillers, it's chills and tension; with horror, it's fear. For historical fiction (one of the many genres involved in this particular novel), I’d add that the central response is nostalgia and a contemplation of the present through the lens of the past with either repulsion or longing. Kindred ticks all those boxes. Atmospheric with surprising touches of humor mingling with constant danger, the vibe is multidimensional, like its creator's previous theatrical work—eerie and provocative with a powerful undertow of terrifying, interracial familial drama.

Kindred is now airing on Hulu.

Carole V Bell is a Jamaican-born writer, culture critic and communication researcher focusing on media, politics, and identity. You can find her on Twitter @BellCV.

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