Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Kindred’ On FX/Hulu, Where A Young Black Writer Gets Transported From 2016 LA To A Plantation In 1815

It’s always interesting when well-regarded hit novels take decades to get to the screen. Octavia Butler’s ambitious novel Kindred, for instance, is just reaching our TVs 43 years after it was published. Why did it take so long? Well, having a story take place in the present or near-present and back in 1815 takes some doing. But it could also be that the issues brought up were just too sensitive for the state of TV at the time. But a new series based on the book is now streaming on Hulu, thanks to FX. Can the series match the ambition of the novel?

KINDRED: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A ceiling fan spins. A woman lies on her stomach on the floor, calling the name “Kevin.” She is obviously in pain.

The Gist: The woman manages to struggle to her feet; she has bleeding welts on her back. She has no idea where Kevin is. She tries to sooth herself with an Epson salt bath. Later, when the police come for a welfare check, she refuses to answer the door.

Two days earlier, Dana James (Mallori Johnson), is in the house; she recently moved to LA from Brooklyn, and got enough from the sale of the brownstone her grandmother left for her that she was able to buy this place near Silver Lake and have enough money left over for her to pursue her dream of writing for TV soaps.

She goes out to dinner with her aunt Denise (Eisa Davis) and her husband Alan (Charles Parnell). When she talks about selling the brownstone and her plans to write for TV, she gets nothing but disapproval from her aunt, who is a nurse and feels that Dana should be pursuing something with a little more stability. As she leaves the exasperating dinner, she finds she needs a phone charger; she gets one from her waiter, Kevin Franklin (Micah Stock), who also offers her a ride home. They talk and hit it off; she invites him to take the LPs she moved from Brooklyn, which he loves because he was in a band and loves music.

That night, Dana has what she thinks is a very vivid dream: She wakes up in a house in what seems like the distant past. A baby is face down in a crib; she turns the boy over, then hears two women talking in the hall. When she sees one of the women, she recognizes her as her mother Olivia (Sheria Irving), who died along with her father when she was 2. When she comes back, she’s in a strange position, and she thinks she must have been sleepwalking.

After a fight with Denise, she calls Kevin over to give her a ride as she drops a lot of money on furniture and other things to fill the house. They bond during the day, and end up having sex that night. But she wakes up to get a glass of water and disappears again, this time to save the same boy, Rufus Weylin (David Alexander Kaplan), from drowning when he is a little older. When she comes back, waterlogged and exhausted, she tells Kevin what she experienced. He, of course, doesn’t believe her, until he sees her disappear and reappear with his own eyes.

What she sees the third time she disappears is shocking: Her mother, who claims she’s been stuck in this time period for over a decade.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Kindred is an adaptation of Octavia Butler’s 1979 novel of the same name, and the plot sounds vaguely like Quantum Leap mixed with Underground.

Our Take: What intrigued us right off the bat about Kindred is that, once the conceit of the series really kicked into gear, where Dana realizes she’s transporting back and forth over 200 years instead of just having a dream, that Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, who adapted the novel, and his writers didn’t spend much time having Dana try to get someone to believe her.

Kevin witnesses her third disappearance, then sees her come back, beaten and bruised after she is attacked by Daniel (Adam Bartley), who is out on patrol looking for runaway slaves. So he knows that something strange is going on with Dana and he’ll end up taking these journeys in time with her. It’s a refreshing turn of events, because it gives Dana an ally right away; she’s not wasting energy trying to get people to believe her because she has someone by her side going through this with her.

That’s good because there’s a lot to unpack with this story. It seems that she’s around the same age that Olivia was when she started going back and forth in time, but Olivia ended up getting stuck in the early 1800s. Is that what’s going to happen with Dana? Where is Dana’s dad, who she thought was also dead? And how is she going to navigate being a world where her life is pretty much controlled in every sense of the word?

The contrast between where Dana finds herself in the 2010s and where she is in the 1810s is what intrigues us the most. How is she going resolve being in a world where she has choices to a world where she doesn’t? And how will the secrets she finds out in the past, especially as she gets to know Olivia, inform how she deals with family like Denise in the present?

We don’t know a ton about Dana in the present, other than the fact that Denise is basically the only family she has and that she loves soaps. It feels like the lack of character development for Dana is purposeful, as her life prior to the time jumps is defined by tragedy and little else. Many details will be filled in during her jumps back to the plantation; what we hope is that the info she gets will motivate her to do whatever she can do to not get stuck in the 1810s forever.

Sex and Skin: There’s some vague nudity shown behind shower doors and lots of steam. Even the sex between Dana and Kevin is implied.

Parting Shot: Dana grabs a picture of Olivia and tells Kevin she saw her mother when she jumped to the past.

Sleeper Star: Gayle Rankin plays Margaret Weylin, Rufus’ mother. She seems to be the only one protecting Rufus against his tyrannical father Thomas (Ryan Kwanten), but she doesn’t control her emotions well. We’ll be interested in seeing how Dana interacts with her going forward.

Most Pilot-y Line: Dana has been “diagramming” episodes of Dynasty as research for her new career, and when she tries to share her interest with Kevin, he falls asleep. He hasn’t even heard of the show, which tells us he has no appreciation for the classics.

Our Call: STREAM IT. There is potential for Kindred to go awry if she show’s writers end up concentrating on the wrong side of Dana’s time travel adventure. But it’s definitely an intriguing premise that brings up so many questions that we’ll keep watching to see if they’re answered.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.