This week, a collaborative effort from History, A&E, and Lifetime brought us one of the biggest TV events of the year: Roots. The three-channel, four-night miniseries is, of course, a remake of ABC’s 1977 project of the same name. The original Roots—itself an adaptation of Alex Haley’s 1976 best-selling book tracing slavery from Africa to the U.S.—is one of the most famous TV events, debuting to rave reviews and enormous ratings that only grew across its eight-night airing. The final part of 1977’s Rootsscored over 100 million viewers—nearly half the U.S. population at the time—and the miniseries went on to win numerous awards, securing it as a milestone of production scale, challenging subject matter, and TV’s potential as a mass medium.
Point being: if ever there was a property that did not need to be remade, it was probably Roots. So why was it?
The simple answer is exactly what you’d expect: Hollywood’s burning desire to grasp hold of any kind of recognizable intellectual property in hopes of standing out in a comically crowded marketplace. There’s a flawed alchemy that leads to projects like this: the original must be simultaneously old enough that valued young viewers won’t have ever seen it before and will therefore check it out, and recognizable enough that older viewers, driven by nostalgia, will tune in again. It’s the same thinking that brought us Fuller House and a bad mini-season of The X-Files and will force MacGyver and Lethal Weapon onto us come this fall. Even though the context is completely different, you can guarantee that some executive looked back at those ratings and Emmys trophies for the original and got very, very excited about the potential value of running it back nearly 40 years later.
The new Roots is a great, if challenging watch—as it should be. History’s version has made some necessary alterations, offering less focus on white characters and doing less work to assuage the guilt of the potential white audience. Still, it stays pretty close to the tone and scope of the original, which is a bit of a double-edged sword. On one hand, it’s damn good. On the other hand, the similarities to the original make this new version seem, like many faithful modernizations, somewhat unnecessary, or at least make the craven IP of it all more noticeable.
It’s even easier to be skeptical or disinterested when other shows like black-ish and The Carmichael Show have managed to address important-but-touchy topics related to race and embed them within contemporary contexts. The People v. O.J. Simpson adeptly traced connective lines between the racial politics of the infamous murder trial/media circus and similarly potent problems facing us today. Even Underground, WGN America’s propulsive combination of the heist thriller and plantation tableaux, finds a creative way to tell a very family story. Not all shows “about slavery” should mix it up by adding Kanye to the soundtrack, but Roots is undeniably old-fashioned in comparison.
Either way, 1977 value predictably hasn’t translated to 2016. Roots debuted to positive reviews, but just over 5 million viewers on Monday evening—and that’s across all three simultaneous airings. For all the supposed IP value, the promotion, and even the talk about modernizing the story for “a Black Lives Matter Era,” the premiere couldn’t top an episode of The Bachelorette driven by a guy named Chad. By non-traditional metrics—social media activity, media coverage, thinkpieces, etc.—Roots is doing pretty well. But remaking one of the medium’s most watched and discussed projects to do “pretty well” probably isn’t heartwarming to many.
However, look beyond the base capitalistic logic of Hollywood’s IP thirst and the decision to redo Roots aligns a little better with History’s recent, well, history. The channel and its corporate partners Lifetime and A&E have scheduled major event series (often around holiday weekends) for a few years now. 2012’s Hatfields & McCoys kicked off this programming strategy in earnest, riding a familiar historical reference point and star power ('sup Kevin Costner) to the most-watched single broadcast on ad-supported cable (a record later broken by The Walking Dead, of course) and a handful of Emmys. Hatfields & McCoys was followed by another smash hit, one based on the most exploited piece of IP we have: The Bible. Since those back-to-back winners in 2012 and 2013, History and company have trotted outBonnie & Clyde, Houdini, Sons of Liberty, and Texas Rising all with the same formula. History might be exploiting our painful past to compete with Game of Thrones for headlines, but at least it’s consistently tried to do so for a few years.
The problem, at least for these cable channels, is that the strategy isn’t exactly working. Every miniseries after 2013’s Bonnie & Clyde has pulled in a fraction of the ratings and even less attention from critics and awards-granting bodies. Ratings are one thing—the Nielsen system is flawed AF, competition on cable is unbelievably tough—but the lack of Emmys and Golden Globes is telling. Hatfield & McCoys, The Bible, and Bonnie & Clyde grabbed 23 Emmy nominations in total. Houdini, Sons of Liberty, and Texas Rising? Just nine. Roots is doing better critically and with audiences than some of those recent miniseries attempts, but Emmy success is no guarantee.
The miniseries categories have grown increasingly crowded over the last few years thanks to the likes of American Horror Story and Fargo. It’s only going to get tougher with American Crime Story, another season of American Crime, HBO’s Night Of, and 10 other things we will have all forgotten come nomination time. If you’re building the case against Roots then, it’s close to the original, with solid ratings, and an outside chance to grab awards attention. Again, that’s not exactly worth treading on history.
Ultimately, Roots serves as a great representative of contemporary TV’s contradictory economic and political structures. It is, all at once, another sign of Hollywood’s creative bankruptcy, the latest in History’s floundering attempts to hold onto its miniseries corner, a model example of how to produce a respectful remake of a lasting classic, and an overly traditional entrant into an important conversation surrounded by bigger, bolder competition. All of that is true, and none of it is really an indictment of Roots as a series or story.
If anything, that this new version of Roots isn’t that different from the original and has so far only garnered a fraction of its success demonstrates yet again how much television has changed in the last 39 years. In 2016, being really good or interesting or “important” like Roots far from guarantees legendary status like it did in 1977. Instead, five million viewers, a bunch of tweets, some awards attention, and posts like this one is about all producers or networks/channels can ask for, especially on cable. And frankly, while Roots may be unnecessary or fail to generate the same kind of conversations as the original, we can all take solace in the fact that it’s not bad. In today’s re-whatever culture, that’s a huge victory in of itself.
