African American science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler (1947–2006) published twelve novels and a collection of short stories. In Butler’s most well-known novel, Kindred (1979), African American Dana, who is its first-person narrator and protagonist, is repeatedly thrown back in time in order to save her white ancestor’s life in Maryland in the early 1800s. More specifically, she is thrown back from her house in Altadena, California, where, in 1976, she has just moved in with her white husband Kevin. In the process, she has to adapt to a time and place where she is regarded and treated as a slave.  

Academic work on Butler’s speculative fiction has increased exponentially since the 1990s, and today Butler is a towering presence in, among other fields, the multidisciplinary field termed Afrofuturism. Since 2013 onwards, her archive at the Huntington Library in California has provided new exciting insights into her works and her own research processes as well as new tools for theorizing her and other writers’ fiction. Her archive is also an inspiration to creative writers, artists, and others. A relatively new development regarding Butler’s oeuvre is the interest in adapting her novels to different media. The Seeing Ear Theater’s online audio theater adaptation of Kindred aired in February 2001. Since then, there have been two graphic novel adaptations: Kindred (2017) and Parable of the Sower (2021), a TV series based on Kindred premiered on Hulu in December 2022, and some of her other novels are considered for film and television adaptations.

Adaptations exhibit the transforming passions of adapters and often trigger passionate responses from readers, viewers, or listeners. In this paper, I will examine the reception of the TV series adaptation in reviews and online comments in order to pinpoint the passions elicited by this adaptation.