I'm Jonathan K. Parton. Welcome to K-Part.

In 2000, American science fiction writer Octavia Butler said of her book,

Kindred, quote,

If a Kindred movie is ever made, I wouldn't be involved.

It won't be my movie, and I suspect it won't look much like my book.

Movies don't usually look much like the books they're taken from, do they?

23 years later, Kindred is on the screen.

American playwright Brandon Jacobs-Jankins,

the two-time Pulitzer finalist and MacArthur Genius Granta Wardee

has adapted Butler's 1979 novel in an eight-part FX series on Hulu.

In this conversation, first recorded for Washington Post Live on November 12,

Jacob Stankins and I get deep in the weeds of the Kindred plot,

why he thinks TV and movies have, quote, damaged our ability to understand history,

and what he is ultimately trying to show about slavery.

The experience of enslavement is, yes,

enforced by violence, but there's a slower, almost prouler violence

that's just about a daily reminder that you're just a passenger in your own life,

that your own existence is in service of someone who claims to own you.

Well, thank you for being here. So, that quote I read from Octavia Butler,

she was talking about a movie, but you turned Kindred into a television

series. Why that medium and why was Kindred right for it?

Yeah, I think, you know, Kindred is the one book of hers that's been under constant

...