With TV on both sides of the Atlantic under pressure to become more diverse, you might think that now would be a better time to make a drama about African-American history than four decades ago. But while the 1977 version of Roots went out in primetime on ABC in the US and BBC1 in the UK, the remake has premiered on niche channels: History in America, and BBC4 in Britain.
One reason for this counter-intuitive retreat is that, although nothing close to equality has been achieved, black actors and narratives are more widely represented than when Alex Haley’s novel was originally dramatised. First time round, the story of Kunta Kinte – kidnapped from his African village to become a slave on a Virginia plantation and a soldier in the American civil war – showed white viewers a suppressed side of history and black audiences a hidden aspect of their identity: the designation “African American”, now standard, was popularised by the show. The hunger for such stories was proved when Roots broke US viewing records; all eight episodes are still in the country’s 100 top-rated shows.
Today, though, it is almost impossible for a single series to create such a fuss. And, as the original Roots remains easily available, there’s also the question, as always with revered TV shows, of why it needs to be remade at all. Yet there are several potential justifications. The African scenes of the new version are filmed in South Africa, rather than the US state of Georgia that was originally used. A greater range of black actors is available, and the new scripts have been able to address claims of plagiarism and historical inaccuracy against Haley’s book. These factors all potentially add authenticity.
But in a scene-by-scene comparison between the opening episodes of Roots from then and now, the major differences reflect changes in racial attitudes. The 1977 series alternated between an American narrative – in which a slave-trading ship sails from Maryland – and an African strand, starting with the birth of Kunta Kinte, son of a Mandinka warrior in the Gambia. The new version, though, features no American characters until Kunta is taken captive and transported to Virginia.
In the 70s, concerned about the willingness of a mainstream US audience to invest in a story of black characters, ABC invented several white figures who were not in Haley’s book; foremost a ship’s captain who was appalled by the idea of slavery and, as a sign of his Christian virtue, declined to use a woman captive as a prostitute. This decent seaman was clearly designed to appease the unease of white viewers over their historical complicity in slavery.
The new Roots is visually more graphic about the degradations of slavery – the ship’s captain is a racist who enjoys his sexual bounty from below decks – but, in intriguing compensation, the African politics are more complex. Although some changes seem designed to make Kunta a more modern role model (he’s planning to leave his village to go to university in Timbuktu), other new touches are tougher. It’s shown – and explained in a lengthy voiceover that too much resembles a TED talk – that some African tribes kept slaves, which they were also prepared to sell to American boats.
But the starkest difference is linguistic. In the original, everyone speaks English, apart from a few native-language exchanges between the slaves, which their captors disparage as “mumbo jumbo”. In tune with modern sensitivities, the new series often allows the African characters their own tongue, subtitled with English – although a contrary impression is given by scenes in which Africans speaking English are also given captions.
As words have always been a tool of racism, an issue for the screenwriters then and now was how to deal with offensive epithets. The 1977 scripts are flinch-inducingly frank, with slaves frequently addressed as “nigger”, and females given the suffix “bitch”. In a decision that could occupy an entire session at a conference on language, the 2016 show loses the B-word but keeps the N-word. However, Kunta and others are generally allowed a response that rejects the insult. If the word has to be spoken in fiction at all – and this raises a debate between historical authenticity and inadvertent normalisation – the call-and-response approach is probably the right one.
And yet, measuring the shows against each other, I was surprised by the result. In 1977, ABC was so unsure about Roots that the then-unprecedented scheduling – over eight successive evenings – was not a case of showcasing but of attempting to limit the presumed impact on ad revenue to the shortest period possible. And seen now, the drama has inevitably dated: the appearances, playing a tribe-member, of OJ Simpson – then an American football hero, now a convicted felon – are unavoidably distracting.
Even so, it’s hard not to applaud the astonishing act of audacity that the 1977 Roots represented in the television culture of the time. With the original now installed in the broadcasting hall of fame, the second Roots was a far easier project to make, but, perhaps because of that, feels less urgent.
Roots starts in the UK on Wednesday 8 February at 9pm on BBC4.
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