Moreover, Butler's Kindred isn't a bold reimagining of 1970s racial politics (the decade of the novel's publication) through a present-day lens. Butler's clear-eyed themes are watered in this series her creative vision of time travel is reduced to an unimaginative parlor trick, and her inspired world-building isn't honored. Though adapted from Octavia Butler's groundbreaking, supernatural novel of the same name, 'Kindred' is a pale imitation of the author's thought-provoking interrogation of slavery's historical role in instigating contemporary systematic inequality. How can she return home? Why can she time travel? And for what purpose? And it appears to all be a terrible nightmare, a figment of her imagination, until she transports herself and Kevin back to Antebellum America.

See, Dana dreams about living during slavery. He often catches her screaming as she sleepwalks. Her white boyfriend, Kevin ( Micah Stock), is similarly worried. She seems impulsive and unwell, like her mother. Though she lost her mother and father years ago to a car accident, Dana does have family in her aunt, a nurse, and her uncle Alan ( Charles Parnell), a retired police officer.

She's recently moved to Los Angeles to break into television writing after selling her grandmother's New York City townhome. We learn the identity of the distraught woman at the center of the drama, Dana (Mallori Johnson). Following the teasing opening, writer and showrunner Branden Jacobs-Jenkins takes viewers back to two days ago.

Kindred series octavia butler