[The 8-episode first season of Kindred forms an uneven, haunting
adaptation of Octavia Butler’s classic.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

HULU’S KINDRED SOLVES THE HANDMAID’S TALE PROBLEM  
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Constance Grady
December 21, 2022
Vox [[link removed]]

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_ The 8-episode first season of Kindred forms an uneven, haunting
adaptation of Octavia Butler’s classic. _

Micah Stock as Kevin Franklin and Mallori Johnson as Dana James in
Kindred. , Tina Rowden/FX

 

Constance Grady [[link removed]] is a
senior correspondent on the Culture team for Vox, where since 2016 she
has covered books, publishing, gender, celebrity analysis, and
theater.

As I prepared to watch FX and Hulu’s new show _Kindred_, I kept
thinking of Hulu’s other big literary adaptation from a few seasons
ago, _The Handmaid’s Tale_
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that _Kindred_, whose eight-episode first season is now streaming on
Hulu, was going to be too close to _Handmaid’s Tale_, in a bad way.

Both shows are based on famously harrowing novels about violent
oppression. _Kindred_ comes from Octavia Butler’s visceral,
haunting story of a Black woman in the 1970s time traveling back to a
plantation in the antebellum South, while _The Handmaid’s Tale_ is
based on Margaret Atwood’s vision of a white woman trapped in
childbearing slavery under a dystopian theocracy in 1980s America.
These books are upsetting reads that delve deeply into the violence
and horror of their worlds, yet when _The Handmaid’s Tale_ made
its way to screens, it did so to diminishing returns.

The first three episodes were brilliant pieces of television, so
disturbing that they felt like watching a frozen scream. But by the
end of the first season, _Handmaid’s Tale_ already felt like it
had little new to say about the violence it was depicting. It started
to feel as though it was simply luxuriating in the atrocities it put
onscreen, that it had become nothing but trauma porn. Later seasons
have not changed that narrative.

How, I wondered, could _Kindred_ avoid the same trap? _Kindred_’s
story is built on the violence enacted on the body of a Black woman,
as well as on the violence she witnesses and is complicit with. Once
all those horrors were put onscreen, what could stop _Kindred_ from
pulling a _Handmaid’s Tale_?

A lot, as it turns out. Under showrunner Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
(_Watchmen_), FX and Hulu’s _Kindred_ seems if anything to have
learned the lesson of _The Handmaid’s Tale_ too well. The
eight-episode first season, which covers the first third of Butler’s
novel, is restrained to a fault. The result comes nowhere close to the
brilliance of _The Handmaid’s Tale_’s first three episodes —
but it also feels much more equipped for a long and compelling run
than its predecessor.

Rating: 3 out of 5

Jacob-Jenkins’s _Kindred_ centers on Dana (Mallori Johnson), an
aspiring TV writer who’s just moved to Los Angeles in the summer of
2016. Orphaned Dana is concerned with navigating her fraught
relationship with her overprotective aunt (Eisa Davis) and a nascent
romantic connection with sweet-natured white Kevin (Micah Stock), but
the world isn’t willing to let her make these everyday problems her
focus. Instead, every few hours, Dana finds herself jolted back to a
massive plantation in 19th-century Virginia, surrounded by people who
believe themselves to be entitled to treat her like property.

Rapidly, Dana realizes that she’s being pulled to the past by Rufus
Weylin (David Alexander Kaplan), the white child of the plantation
owners. Rufus is one of Dana’s ancestors, and every time his life is
in danger, Dana gets hauled into the past to rescue him. In order to
put a stop to the time travel, she realizes, she’ll have to make
certain Rufus lives long enough for her next ancestor to be born.

Central to the horror of Butler’s novel is the queasy, unsettling
realization that Rufus will be fathering that child on a Black woman
whom he will most likely enslave. Dana has, in other words, found
herself forced to be an accessory to her ancestress’s rape in order
to ensure her own existence.

Meanwhile, to survive, Dana must live enslaved on the Weylin
plantation. Without any control over her comings and goings from the
past, she watches the people enslaved by the Weylins beaten, deprived
of food, and forced into demeaning pageants. What, she wonders, will
protect her from the same fate as long as she’s stuck in the past?

This is upsetting stuff, but Jacob-Jenkins sketches it in lightly;
probably, in most cases, too lightly. Butler’s depiction of the
Weylin plantation was upsettingly visceral, but on television we get
so few details that the plantation fails to feel lived in. It becomes
the stage for a morality play instead, a cardboard backdrop inhabited
by cartoonish figures of evil.

Dana, too, feels underwritten in this version of the story. Johnson
plays the role with a terrific steeliness masking a trembling-chin
vulnerability, but the writing is so vague that we get little sense of
Dana as an individual human being beyond her extraordinary
circumstances. Adding to the cloudiness of her characterization is the
fact that her most emotional moments come in a messy, extraneous
subplot that Jacob-Jenkins has rather bafflingly added to the story.
Dana now finds her long-lost mother in the past, in a storyline that
is positioned as central to Dana’s emotional arc despite it seeming
to exist mainly to streamline the exposition about the rules of
Dana’s time travel.

More compelling is Dana’s surprisingly tender love story with Kevin,
who finds himself dragged into the past along with her. While
Butler’s version of the story sees Kevin and Dana as a married
couple, Jacob-Jenkins makes theirs a new relationship. Much of the
first episode, in fact, takes the form of a Kevin and Dana rom-com,
complete with meet-cute and gentle bantering over _Dynasty_ reruns.
It’s a sweet choice that grounds the terrors that are to come in a
gentler present tense.

Once they’re back in the past, _Kindred_ gets a lot of mileage out
of the way Kevin finds himself utterly unequipped to navigate a world
that Dana grasps and is able to operate within in minutes: He has
never had to consider emotionally what the antebellum South looked
like or how he would have to behave in such a world. Yet regardless of
how bad Kevin’s impression of a 19th-century gentleman is (he’s
taken a vow of poverty, he claims at one point, to explain why he
keeps showing up on their land in ratty T-shirts and no shoes), the
Weylins still make him a favored houseguest. No matter what the year
is, Kevin is always protected by his whiteness, and he always feels
guilty about it.

Kevin is not, however, able to protect Dana all that much, which is
the heart of this story. Dana, it develops, can only travel back to
the present when she is in genuine fear for her life. In turn, that
means that as she slowly becomes inured to the horrors of the past, it
becomes harder and harder for her to leave it behind. At first, the
sight of a gun sends her screaming back to the safety of her living
room, but as time goes on, casual threats of violence become part of
her routine. They fail to frighten her the way they used to.

The problem that leaves Dana stuck in time is a close cousin to the
problem that made _The Handmaid’s Tale_ start great and get bad:
Over time, violence loses its power to shock in a productive way. It
becomes vacated of any meaning beyond violence itself, suffered for
its own sake. On television, the result is boring and unpleasant; for
Dana, the result is horrific and painful and dangerous.

But the fact that _Kindred_ understands this trap so well says a lot
for its ability to depict violence without falling into the trap of
misery porn. The spectacle of violence and danger in this show exist
not merely as spectacle but inherently as movers of story, dragging
Dana back and forth across history. When _Kindred_ at last scales up
its violence in the season finale to a horrific whipping scene, the
moment cannot feel gratuitous, because it shapes the story so
viscerally.

_Kindred_ in its first season has problems, big ones. Its central
character is underdeveloped, and its world is not yet lived in. But it
nailed the problem of pacing exactly: It has started slow and it’s
building up. With luck, it has laid the foundation for a very good
second season.

* kindred
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* Octavia Butler
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* black literature
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* slave control
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