Social change
EVEN WITH A&E’S NEW VERSION OF ROOTS, THERE WILL NEVER BE ANYTHING LIKE THE ORIGINAL
Every remake, reboot and reimagining is trading off its famous name to some degree, trying to slip you into a comfortable place, prime your interest, if not also tell you how you should feel about it. It’s safe to say that virtually none of them has a higher bar to live up to than Roots, the A&E miniseries that is updating the landmark television event for 2016.
There has been, and will likely never be, anything like the series. Based on Alex Hawley’s book, Roots traced his ancestors from their origins in West Africa through the American slave system. Over the course of its eight-night run in January 1977 — crammed together, the story goes, because ABC wanted to get what it saw as a social obligation over with — more than half of the country, a 51.1 share in rating terms, tuned in.
A few more discreet television moments, l argely some f orm of stunt, have managed to grab slightly higher shares of the audience. Dallas’s Who Shot J.R.? episode, perhaps the closest thing to a meme the ’ 80s produced, did slightly better ( 53.3), and the alltime recordholder, the MASH finale, supposedly altered the pressure of the nation’s sewer pipes, so many people took bathroom breaks in unison (which will happen when 60.2 per cent of a country watches together).
But they were one-offs: getting half the country to tune in, night after night, for more than a week — I doubt even a hung presidential election could pull that off these days.
Maybe an alien invasion, if they left our satellites intact. Or Chewbacca Mom dancing to Gangnam Style? The most popular shows today, aside from sports broadcasts, do not regularly crack 10 per cent of households. And even our viral hits, vastly shorter and more ac cessible, don’t reach that kind of saturation.
The biggest part of why that is, of course, is that the ’ 70s are a monoculture that’s nearly impossible to fathom from our vantage point. There were three television channels in America at the time; if you wanted to see a movie, your choice was basically whatever the local theatre was playing. There were barely more than a handful of radio stations or two newspapers in any city that wasn’t New York. A culture watched together, if only because of a lack of options.
To be fair, Roots still did nearly incomprehensible numbers compared to its competition: double the other popular shows of its era. Still, even if its 2016 incarnation pulled off the same feat, it wouldn’t even be seen by 20 per cent of us. We simply don’t coalesce in that fashion anymore.
Roots is kind of a doubly interesting case- study for this kind of thing not just because of its popularity, but because of its effect. Airing less than a decade after major civil rights milestones, it was for a large majority of (white) Americans the first time they were ever really forced to grapple with the reality of slavery — not just its facts and effects, but the actual experience of slaves, and the wound it left on the country, still festering today.
In the parlance of our times, Roots came from the mouths of the oppressed, forcing the white plurality not just to empathize with the slave experience, but to confront its own role in it. One of the ori ginal series more brilliant moves was using familiar, beloved white faces as impossibly compromised or cruel masters, from Ed Asner to Mr. Brady himself, Robert Reed. Most notably, 12 Years A Slave smartly copied this level of horrible implication and identification.
The amount of time it took to get this kind of story into the monoculture — see “social obligation,” above — is in some respects a cheer for its demise. Now a different perspective is a click away — we are so thoroughly drowning in them many of us have gotten defensive, shuttling them under dismissive names or talking about them like mere trends.
At the same time, though, we can hardly say with certainty that this flood of tributaries has necessarily changed the flow of the river. We are so free to find our own channels that we don’t even need to make excuses or plead ignorance. We are able to just be ignorant, to never confront anything outside of our preferred stream.
It would be glib to raise 1977’s Roots above the interconnected work of thousands of activists, leaders and artists, but a pop cultural phenomenon does have a way of weaving together threads, or at least giving people an assumed shorthand, a common ground from which to talk: even Kendrick Lamar, born, like most of his audience, a decade after Roots aired, can name- drop Kunta Kinte and feel safely understood.
We still have our moments, of course, but that ground grows less common, in both senses, by the day. Part of the consequence of that, of course, is reaching into the past to find something we might recognize: reinterpreting Roots for our era, rather than searching for a new story that might explain it better.
The other part, of course, is not even trying to talk to the mass, because we can never really expect them to listen like that ever again.
ROOTS CAME FROM THE MOUTHS OF THE OPPRESSED