TV SERIES THAT
DISNEY ’S The Lion King begins with a newborn cub being held aloft in celebration – an homage to what is arguably the most significant television drama to hit our screens: Roots.
Forty years after Kunta Kinte was raised in the air by his father in the TV adaptation of Alex Haley’s novel, a remake of the harrowing series is introducing new audiences to the horror of the slave trade.
Historians are asking if the series being shown on BBC4, coming amid the Black Lives Matter movement, could have the same impact as the original 1977 US show.
Writing in The New York Times, historian Roger Wilkins said its importance was comparable to the Montgomery bus boycott and the Selma to Montgomery march led by Martin Luther King in 1965.
Others argued opening up old wounds created a deeper divide. Then future president Ronald Reagan said: “Very frankly, I thought the bias of all the good people being one colour and all the bad people being another was rather destructive.”
The TV series was commissioned after Haley’s book became a sensation in 1976, spending 22 weeks at the top of The New York Times bestseller list, and later winning a Pulitzer Prize.
However, network bosses felt a show
that would air to a mainly white audience but tell the story of an African family who endured enslavement before achieving freedom was a huge gamble.
ABC entertainment president Fred Silverman and his executives filled the cast with familiar names such as football star OJ Simpson, poet Maya Angelou, John Amos from The Mary Tyler Moore Show and The Brady Bunch’s Robert Reed.
Black stars including Leslie Uggams, Madge Sinclair, Ben Vereen, and newcomer LeVar Burton, who would later star in Star Trek: The New Generation, also appeared.
Scriptwriters created a conflicted white slave ship captain played by affable Ed Asner, while adverts in TV guides said: “The triumph of an American family.”
White actors featured heavily in promotional spots and planners chose to run it over eight consecutive nights in case it bombed. But it became the second most watched series finale with 100 million viewers, behind M*A*S*H*.
Alex Haley worked for the coast guard and taught himself to write on long voyages during 20 years at sea. He petitioned bosses to become a writer and he finished his service in 1959 as the first chief journalist in the US Coast Guard. He wrote for Readers Digest and Playboy, interviewing stars including jazz musician Miles Davis, and rose to prominence after his first book, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, came out in 1965. It would take him 11 years before he finished Roots: The Saga of an American Family. He said of his inspiration: “I came upon the Rosetta Stone in the British Museum, marvelling at how Jean Champollion, the French archaeologist, had miraculously deciphered its ancient texts. “I was on a jet returning to New York when a thought hit me. Those strange, unknowntongue sounds, part of our family’s old story, were obviously bits of our original Kin-tay’s native tongue.” Speaking to a language specialist he