Nearly 40 years ago, the harsh realities and moral scourge of slavery were beamed into the comforts of America’s living room, as the miniseries Roots told the horrific tale of slavery in the U.S., and in the easily understood media language of the everyperson — including this then-teenaged, impressionable viewer. In some way, we, as a general populace (100 million of which tuned into the final episode) came to picture the nature of subjugation by the vivid terms laid out on television. Here was a brand of “reality” television once removed — albeit in the narrative, “factional” context of historical drama — and with a higher cause. The ripples are felt in the collective consciousness, even still, and in newly revitalizing and Roots’-y roots-rediscovery ways.
In 1977, Roots brought to the small (but mass-culturally mighty) screen author Alex Haley’s epic roots-discovery mission — an account of his family tree going back to patriarch Kunta Kinte’s abduction from Gambia in the late 18th century through his forcibly estranged offspring’s fates to the qualified moment of “emancipation.” Two years later, the story moved forward in time, lineages, and in the successive waves of racial disparity and struggle, in 1979’s Roots: The Next Generations.
Fast-forward to the 2010s, and the saga continues, impacted and refracted by the recent Ferguson, Missouri–born Black Lives Matter movement and the controversy over the paucity of black artists in this year’s Academy Awards. Last week’s airing of the Roots remake retold Haley’s story in ways more vivid and enriched by new historical information and by standards of cinema/television, in a time when serialized television has come of age as an art form with higher ambitions, greater respect, and talent of an order formerly resistant to the “smallness” of TV. From a contemporary flat-screen-era TV watcher’s perspective, the miniseries was successfully addictive for “real time” viewers last week, and should be amply seductive to after-the-fact binge watchers.