[TV] Review: ‘Roots’ for a Black Lives Matter Era

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Review: 'Roots' for a Black Lives Matter Era
from The New York Times


Malachi Kirby, center, as Kunta Kinte in "Roots." Credit Casey Crafford/A+E Networks


The original mini-series "Roots" was about history, and it was history itself. Airing on ABC in January 1977, this generational saga of slavery was a kind of answer song to the 1976 Bicentennial celebration of the (white, often slave-owning) founding fathers. It reopened the books and wrote slaves and their descendants into the national narrative.

But as an event, it was also a chapter in that story. It shaped and was shaped by the racial consciousness of its era. It was a prime-time national reckoning for more than 100 million viewers. As a television drama, it was excellent. But as a television broadcast, it was epochal.

The four-night, eight-hour remake of "Roots," beginning Memorial Day on History, A&E and Lifetime, is largely the same story, compressed in some places and expanded in others, with a lavish production and strong performances. It is every bit as worthy of attention and conversation. But it is also landing, inevitably, in a very different time.

Viewers who watched "Roots" four decades ago have since lived with racial narratives of moving forward and stepping back. They've seen America's first black president elected and a presidential candidate hesitate to disavow the Ku Klux Klan.

So in timing and spirit, this is a Black Lives Matter "Roots," optimistic in focusing on its characters' strength, sober in recognizing that we may never stop needing reminders of whose lives matter.

The first new episode, much of it shot in South Africa, looks stunning, another sign of the cultural times. Kunta Kinte (Malachi Kirby, in the role made famous by LeVar Burton) is now not a humble villager but the scion of an important clan, and his home — Juffure, in Gambia — a prosperous settlement. Kunta is captured by a rival family and sold into slavery to a Virginian (James Purefoy), by way of a harrowing Middle Passage.

Mr. Kirby's Kunta is a more regal and immediately defiant character than Mr. Burton's. But his tragedy is the same: He rebels but fails and is beaten into accepting his slave name, Toby. The name — the loss of identity — is as much a weapon as the whip. As the overseer who beats him puts it: "You can't buy a slave. You have to make a slave."

Kunta stops running, but he preserves his traditions, including the practice of presenting a newborn baby to the night sky with the words, "Behold, the only thing that is greater than you."

That theme of belonging to something larger, of the ancestral family as a character in itself, is essential to "Roots." Although Alex Haley fictionalized the events of his novel on which the mini-series is based, his story offered black Americans what slavery was machine-tooled to erase: places, dates, names, memories. And that focus keeps the ugliness — the racial slurs, the gruesome violence — from rendering this series without hope. A person may live and die in this system, but a people can survive it.

Still, the individual stories remain heartbreaking, even in small moments, as when the slave musician Fiddler (a soulful Forest Whitaker) recognizes a Mandinka tune he overhears Kunta singing. He's moved — and, it seems, a little frightened by what the recognition stirs in him. As much as he's worked to efface his heritage as a survival strategy, it lingers, a few notes haunting the outskirts of his memory.

Kunta's daughter, Kizzy (E'myri Lee Crutchfield as a child, Anika Noni Rose as an adult), is teased with the possibility of a better life; she grows up friends with the master's daughter and learns to read. But she's sold to Tom Lea (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), a struggling farmer who rapes and impregnates her. Rape — there are several assaults in this series — is another weapon against identity, another way you make a slave. Ms. Rose burns with Kizzy's determination to hang on to her sense of self.


From center left, Malachi Kirby, Forest Whitaker and Emayatzy Corinealdi in "Roots." Credit Steve Dietl/A+E Networks

Kizzy and Tom Lea's son, Chicken George (Regé-Jean Page, walking nimbly in Ben Vereen's footsteps) makes his name raising fighting cocks for his master-father. The series has lighter moments, especially with the charismatic George, but those can quickly turn dark at an owner's whim. Childhood friends grow up; promises get broken; there are no good masters.

At eight hours over four nights, each with a separate director, this "Roots" is about a third shorter than the original. It focuses less on white characters — gone is Ed Asner's conscience-stricken slave-ship captain, a sop to white viewers — though there are insights about how class resentment feeds bigotry.

You feel the story's compression most in the second half, especially the melodramatic, rushed final episode, which works in both the story of George's son Tom (Sedale Threatt Jr.) — named, under duress, for his slave-master grandfather — and George's service in the Civil War. This mini-series ends emotionally, but it emphasizes that there is no permanent happily-ever-after: "Every day," the younger Tom says, "always going to be someone wants to take away your freedom."

Overall, the remake, whose producers include Mr. Burton and Mark M. Wolper (whose father, David L. Wolper, produced the original "Roots"), ably polishes the story for a new audience that might find the old production dated and slow. What it can't do, because nothing can now, is command that audience.

As homogeneous as the old-school, three-network TV system could be, as many faces as it left out, "Roots" was an example of what it could do at its best. I watched it when I was 8 years old because it was all anyone was talking about, including the kids in my mostly white small-town school. A generation of viewers — whatever we looked like, wherever we came from, wherever we ended up — carried the memory of Kunta having his name beaten out of him.

Viewers will have to seek out this "Roots," like every program now. Today's universe of channels and streaming outlets presents a much wider range of identity and experience. But we see it in smaller groups and take away different memories.

That's not the fault of "Roots," of course; it's simply our media world. The legacy of representation now lives in a constellation of programs, among them dramas like "Underground," which imagines its slave-escape story as an action thriller; comedies like "black-ish" and "The Carmichael Show," with their complex ideas of black identity; and this "Roots," still a necessary story, but now one story among many.