I was 11, growing up in a white, middle-class neighborhood in Wisconsin, and it had a big impression on me. Michael Mechanic: I’m old enough to have seen Roots when it first came out, and I can remember how big a deal it was. (You can watch it here.) And who better to watch it with than Delmont? What follows is the first of our four conversations recapping each installment as it airs. But we have never seen it, never in such painstaking detail and never being experienced with such excruciating pain.”Īs you’ve likely heard, Roots is back, re-envisioned for a 2016 audience and airing for four straight nights on History starting last night. Delmont quotes a Washington Post reviewer: “The scenes on the ship, with the slaves chained together, stacked alongside one another, lying in their vomit and excrement…are something we have never seen before. But simply depicting the horrors of slavery onscreen was revolutionary. In his upcoming book, Making Roots : A Nation Captivated, Arizona State University historian Matthew Delmont recalls how the original book and series took flack for historical inaccuracies, and how Haley himself was attacked for plagiarizing passages and for playing loose with the facts. It was the most-watched miniseries in history, beating out the previous year’s Gone With the Wind saga, which depicted a romantic version of slavery. By the finale, more than 36 million households (100 million-plus individuals) were tuned in.
America’s population was just 220 million then-it’s 323 million now-and nearly 29 million households watched Roots that first night. In the premium realm, in April, the season premiere of HBO’s popular Game of Thrones drew roughly 8 million viewers.Ĭompare that with Roots, the eight-part miniseries based on Alex Haley’s fictionalized family history, which first aired on ABC in January 1977. ( Empire led among black viewers.) For regular cable, The Walking Dead dominated with 14 million viewers. For network TV, as of the end of March, Nielsen listed The Big Bang Theory, with 14.2 million viewers, followed by Empire, with 12.5 million. What are the most-watched shows on television these days? I checked. Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.
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