Kindred

Kindred never manages to improve after its intriguing pilot, one that promised a compelling mystery and plenty of tense moments. Instead, the focus is on ancillary characters that are not only obnoxious but lifeless as well, and spends the bulk of the story down on the plantation. Ultimately, this is a mystery that I won’t be returning to find out the answers to.

The time jump [from 1976 in the book to the show's 2016] may rankle purists, but it’s hard to imagine that an author as prescient as Butler, who died in 2006, wouldn’t appreciate such an update. ... “Kindred” takes other detours that don’t pay off as well in the first season. ... The series weaves in a thread aligning the 19th-century patrolmen who gleefully round up runaways with modern-day police forces, a comparison Butler explored much more subtly in her book.

The character work, the chemistry between Johnson and Stock, and the sense of creeping dread that comes from her brief journeys to the plantation are all very effective early on — almost too effective. Once the season evolves from toggling back and forth between the two eras and devotes itself to a few extended stays in 1815, Kindred quickly begins to drag, as if it doesn’t want to be in this time and place any more than Dana or Kevin initially do.

Where Butler started with characters and imagined a world around them, the series starts with a received notion of the world and shuffles characters around within it, relying on mystery, melodrama and a smidgen of wry humor for its entirely ordinary effects.

By the time it all comes to an oddly open-ended conclusion, what remains clear is that the most meaningful parts of the series are those that were already done better and with more care in Butler's hands.

It’s a credit to showrunner Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins that the whole thing doesn’t collapse under the weight of its premise. That said, the project does betray the telltale stress marks of trying to make Butler’s complicated book fit a serialized TV framework, relying on cliffhangers to the point of exhaustion.