But it cannot possibly have the cultural impact of the first series. THC’s new “Roots” features many admirable performances, and has more thematic complexity and much higher production values than the stodgy, stagey LeVar Burton original. On the principle that historical fiction always tells us more about the present than about the past, we can conclude that Haley’s 1976 book pursuing his ancestry all the way back through the age of slavery and into Africa, and then the 1977 miniseries that was seen by more than half the United States population, described a moment when many Americans were ready to begin reckoning with the darkest areas of our national story. What did we learn from “Roots” in the 1970s, and what can we learn from it now, as a buffed-up action-adventure remake whose final chapter airs Thursday on the History Channel? The important questions, I would say, are about what kind of imaginative work “Roots” is and was, and what image we see reflected when we gaze into it. Four decades after the publication of Alex Haley’s Pulitzer-winning book and the production of an NBC miniseries that reshaped America’s consciousness, it’s definitely not a secret. It wasn’t presented that way at first, which has led to no end of grief and confusion over the years, but at this point that’s hardly an indictment. “Roots,” in its various forms, is largely a work of imagination rather than history.
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