Kindred

In the new series “Kindred,” there comes a moment when a bedridden child (David Alexander Kaplan) musters the strength to call his caretaker the N-word. The mere act is jarring — but what startles yet more is that the woman he’s addressed speaks up for herself. Dana, the protagonist of “Kindred” (Mallori Johnson) has been magically sent from the modern day back to a 19th-century plantation. Her sense of her rights coexists uneasily with the world into which she’s been thrust.Kindred Season 1 Download.

Adapted from Octavia E. Butler’s novel, “Kindred” makes a case for itself in a by-now overstuffed genre. Exploitative projects like Amazon’s series “Them” or the film “Antebellum” have seemed at times to be trading on Black trauma, giving potential viewers cause for hesitation. Certainly, another Amazon show, the magisterial “The Underground Railroad,” seemed like a potential last word on the subject of America’s tragic history of human enslavement for a while. But as adapted by the playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, “Kindred” is a sharp exploration of history, national and personal.

Dana comes into focus rapidly: In the present day, she’s a woman who carries ghosts, one who can’t get out from under a feeling of loneliness at having lost her mother. She spends her days watching “Dynasty” in order to crack what makes its stories work, so that she, too, might become a screenwriter; she’s drawn to the confidence of Diahann Carroll. And, feeling alienated, she’s drawn, too, to a waiter she meets when dining at a restaurant; Kevin (Micah Stock) becomes her companion as she jumps through time.Which means that he, a white man, is forced to play her owner; Ryan Kwanten, as Tom Weylin, encounters the two 21st-century Americans and reads them as slave and owner. Weylin is a brute, but one sees within Kwanten’s performance something else as well.