Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Will Pen Kindred Pilot for FX

Pulitzer Prize Finalist Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (Everybody, Gloria) will write and executive produce a pilot for FX based on Octavia E. Butler's novel Kindred, according to Variety.

Butler's novel, first published in 1979, is modeled on slave narratives and concerns a young Black writer, Dana, who relocates to Los Angeles but is pulled back and forth in time to a pre-Civil War Maryland plantation, where she meets her ancestors.

“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,” Jacobs-Jenkins says. “It has been the highlight and honor of my career thus far to try and finally bring this timeless story to life—and especially at FX, whose catalogue of bold, thought-provoking, and cutting-edge television has been an endless source of inspiration and delight.”

Executive producers also include Courtney Lee-Mitchell, Joe Weisberg, Joel Fields, and Darren Aronofsky for Protozoa Pictures with co-executive producers Ernestine Walker and Merrilee Heifetz, and producer FX Productions.

Other works from MacArthur “Genius” Grant recipient Butler, who passed away in 2006, include Fledgling, Parable of the Sower, and the Patternist series. Jacobs-Jenkins, a consulting producer for HBO's Watchmen, is also the playwright of An Octoroon and Appropriate.