‘Roots’: Remade For A New Generation

In 1977, Roots was an ABC miniseries that was a surprise and a shock: Mass America hadn’t seen anything so harrowingly explicit about the evils of slavery on network television. The production racked up enormous ratings in a three-network universe — it inaugurated the concept of “event television.” Now comes a new version of Roots, still based on Alex Haley’s research-based novel of the same name. It’s a four-night production starting Memorial Day night and airing on three cable channels — History, A&E, and Lifetime — and it feels once again like the kind of television that could unite a vast audience.

The story traces history from 1750 through the end of the Civil War, and begins with the West African Mandinka warrior Kunta Kinte. He was played in the original by LeVar Burton, who is now a producer of the new project. Burton was then an unknown actor and the role made him a star; it’s likely to do the same for the new Kunta Kinte, played by the British actor Malachi Kirby with enormous charisma and skill.

Related: Get to Know ‘Roots’ Remake Star Malachi Kirby — and His Road to an Iconic Role

Each of the four nights of the new Roots was overseen by a different, prominent director — Thomas Carter, Mario Van Peebles, Philip Noyce, and Bruce Beresford — but the miniseries coheres as a unified whole, and gains an urgency in the era of Black Lives Matter.

For the new generation unfamiliar with Roots, it tells the story of Kunta Kinte’s capture and enslavement, his perilous journey to America in a slave ship, and his life on a Southern plantation, where he is re-named Toby. This Roots places heavy emphasis on Kinte’s rebellious nature and strength of character in refusing to accept his slave-name, which in turn leads to succeeding generations of his family — whose descendants include Emayatzy Corinealdi as his wife, Belle, Anika Noni Rose as daughter Kizzy, and Kizzy’s son, Chicken George, played by Rege-Jean Page — to tell of Kinte’s struggles as inspirational stories that grow into a legend. (The cast is also helped, on the slave-owner side, by the varied cruelties of men played by James Purefoy, Matthew Goode, and Jonathan Rhys Meyers.)

The new production, hatched by producer Mark Wolper, son of the original Roots producer David Wolper, takes full advantage of a budget and special effects that enable the new Roots to stage elaborate scenes. In the first night, Kinte’s journey from Africa to America in the hold of a ship is agonizingly vivid; in the final night’s installment, whole Civil War battles are staged. In between, the characterization is vivid. Forest Whitaker’s Fiddler — a role that won Louis Gossett, Jr., an Emmy — is shrewd as an enslaved musician, and Page’s Chicken George (once a star-making role for Ben Vereen) is a verbally adroit man compelled by his circumstances to become a wily hustler to protect himself and his family.

The fourth night, set during the Civil War, gets a bit bogged down with a subplot involving Southerners played by Anna Paquin and Mekhi Phifer as spies for the North. And occasionally, the dialogue can be stilted (“Reading is my way of being a warrior; being free inside!”). But otherwise, there’s surprisingly little padding for a four-night, eight-hour miniseries. The original Roots was a ground-breaker that had to rely on melodrama for its greatest effects. The new Roots excels in the naturalism of its performances to make the horror of slavery vividly painful — and the resistance to it uplifting — in a way that deepens the tale.

Roots will air Monday through Thursday at 9 p.m. on History, A&E, and Lifetime.

Meet Malachi Kirby: