The biggest change is the introduction of a character, connected closely to Dana, whose presence amps up the emotions in uninteresting ways while muddying the story’s central themes of kinship, guilt and shared responsibility. (For another recent example, see Apple TV+’s series based on Min Jin Lee’s “Pachinko.”) The playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (“An Octoroon”), who developed the series, has made fundamental changes that “open up” the story in conventional ways while dissipating the intensity of Butler’s narrative. The tendency to inject melodrama and sensationalism, to shy away from tough-mindedness and harshness, and to bollix up story lines, is a familiar one in open-ended adaptations of self-contained, literary novels it almost seems unavoidable. (The present-day plot has, unfortunately, been significantly expanded.) Butler grounded her speculation in historical and, crucially, psychological reality the series takes her story elements and slices, dices and pads them in a way that keeps us from believing or becoming invested in the characters Butler worked so hard to build.

It is hard to believe much of anything that happens in FX’s “Kindred,” in either the skimpy, cardboard depiction of plantation life or in the clichéd presentation of modern city life. The other side of Butler’s storytelling equation has gone missing, however. Like other involuntary-time-travel stories, it is inherently suspenseful, generating cliffhangers at regular intervals, and the show takes full advantage. Only minutes or hours have elapsed in the present when she returns home, sometimes after perilous weeks or months in the past. (Made for FX, it premieres Tuesday on Hulu.) The ingenious premise is still there: Dana James (Mallori Johnson), now an aspiring television writer in 2016 Los Angeles, finds herself being zapped to 1815 Maryland whenever Rufus Weylin (David Alexander Kaplan), the young son of a plantation owner, feels his life is in danger and he needs saving.

“Kindred” is finally coming to the screen, 43 years after its publication, not as a movie or a mini-series but as an eight-episode season meant to be the first in a series. The effectiveness of the fantasy depends on the density of the reality. But its power comes from Butler’s meticulously imagined depiction of the lives of slaves and slave owners in the antebellum South and her rigorous consideration of how a time-traveling contemporary Black woman (circa 1976) might fare in that world. You may race through the book because it’s a cleverly constructed and paced science-fiction(-ish) page-turner. Butler’s beloved novel “Kindred” is its believability.

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