Roots

[Montegriffo]

The remake of the 1970's series Roots is now showing on British TV. I remember watching the original and can't believe it was 40 years ago.
Tonight was the 3rd of 4 episodes and it has been really harrowing. It is very well made and acted but hard to watch at times. It is difficult to believe sometimes how men can treat others and the crippling of Kunta Kinte was particularly hard to watch.
I've not read the book so I don't know how faithful it is and after 40 years it's hard to remember the original in detail to make a comparison.
Luckily it is on the BBC so not interrupted by commercials and is being shown in 90min episodes.
What do others think about it and how it compares with the original?

[TheReal_ND]

Imo it portrays the absolute worst of slavery conditions in the United States. Of course it would be kind of boring to show all the cases were slaves were treated relatively well as far as the plantation style afforded. That would be boring to watch though. Slavery was a mistake and a crime but I can't help but wonder how much that movie is responsible for making the current situation worse.

[Montegriffo]

Imo it portrays the absolute worst of slavery conditions in the United States. Of course it would be kind of boring to show all the cases were slaves were treated relatively well as far as the plantation style afforded. That would be boring to watch though. Slavery was a mistake and a crime but I can't help but wonder how much that movie is responsible for making the current situation worse.

Funny, I thought it showed a lot of "free" time and very little hard labour in the fields which I remember as being more in the original series. Obviously it is a dramatized story but I don't believe anything portrayed was unrealistic apart from maybe how much talking back to the white men Chicken George seemed to get away with.
One more episode to go and I'm looking forward to a relatively "happy ending".

[MilSpecs]

It's been a long time since I read the book but I remember the miniseries was fairly true to the book. The miniseries was groundbreaking at the time, since it was the first time an accurate depiction of the historic common black experience was seen by so many Americans. I saw the miniseries first and then read the book.

[SuburbanFarmer]

putting this on my watch list. I never saw the original.

In semi-related news, the Cosmos remake was fucking awesome, but not as good as the Carl Sagan version.

[Montegriffo]

I imagine the history of slavery is taught more in US schools than in the UK. The original series came out when I was 11 or 12 and may have been responsible for it being taught more than previously.
There were only 3 TV stations at the time so nearly everyone watched it.
Same with the series Holocaust which was around the same time.
My father and I watched them together but I do remember that some of my school friends parents didn't let them watch as they thought it was not suitable for 11 year olds.

[SuburbanFarmer]

I imagine the history of slavery is taught more in US schools than in the UK. The original series came out when I was 11 and may have been responsible for it being taught more than previously.
There were only 3 TV stations at the time so nearly everyone watched it.
Same with the series Holocaust which was around the same time.
My father and I watched them together but I do remember that some of my school friends parents didn't let them watch as they thought it was not suitable for 11 year olds.

Never heard of Holocaust the series, but yeah... we had slavery pretty well drilled into our heads, even in the 90s. It's dwelled on and rehashed daily in our media, no matter what. Every NPR (public radio) morning show has a segment on gender equality or civil righs.

[MilSpecs]

I imagine the history of slavery is taught more in US schools than in the UK. The original series came out when I was 11 or 12 and may have been responsible for it being taught more than previously.
There were only 3 TV stations at the time so nearly everyone watched it.
Same with the series Holocaust which was around the same time.
My father and I watched them together but I do remember that some of my school friends parents didn't let them watch as they thought it was not suitable for 11 year olds.

I don't remember much about the topic from school other than being taught about the triangle trade and the civil war. I'm sure it's taught much more in depth now.

[Montegriffo]

Seems to be available free on you tube
Holocaust came out in 1978 and was even more harrowing than Roots. I'm surprised it hasn't been repeated every few years. It was critically acclaimed at the time although criticised by some for commercialising and trivialising the holocaust.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_(miniseries)

Some critics accused the miniseries of trivializing the Holocaust. The television format meant that the realism of the situation was muted, while the fact that NBC made a financial gain from advertising led to accusations that the tragedy was being commercialized. Holocaust's creators defended it by arguing that it was an important factor in developing and maintaining awareness of the Holocaust. With the exception of such movies as The Diary of Anne Frank, Judgment at Nuremberg, and The Hiding Place, this was the first time many Americans had seen any lengthy dramatization of the Holocaust which introduced character portrayals of victims and their personal stories. The television critic Clive James commended the production. Writing in The Observer (reprinted in his collection The Crystal Bucket), he commented:

The German Jews were the most assimilated in Europe. They were vital to Germany's culture—which, indeed, has never recovered from their extinction. They couldn't see they were hated in direct proportion to their learning, vitality and success. The aridity of the Nazi mind was the biggest poser the authors had to face. In creating Erik Dorf they went some way towards overcoming it. Played with spellbinding creepiness by Michael Moriarty, Erik spoke his murderous euphemisms in a voice as juiceless as Hitler's prose or Speer's architecture. Hitler's dream of the racially pure future was of an abstract landscape tended by chain-gangs of shadows and crisscrossed with highways bearing truckloads of Aryans endlessly speeding to somewhere undefined. Dorf sounded just like that: his dead mackerel eyes were dully alight with a limitless vision of banality

In January 1979, Holocaust aired in West Germany.[4] With an estimated viewership of up to 15 million households, the miniseries turned out to be extremely popular during its initial airing, leading to an increased public interest in the crimes committed during the Nazi era. The series was watched by 20 million people, or 50 percent of West Germany's population, and it first brought the matter of the genocide during World War II to widespread public attention in a way that it never was before.[4] After each part of Holocaust was aired, there was a companion show where a panel of historians could answer questions from people phoning in.[4] The historian's panels were overwhelmed with thousands of phone calls from shocked and outraged Germans. The German historian Alf Lüdtke wrote that the historians "could not cope" as they were faced with thousands of angry phone-callers asking how these things could happen.[4] Subsequently the Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache named the term "Holocaust" as German Word of the Year

[Montegriffo]

I don't remember much about the topic from school other than being taught about the triangle trade and the civil war. I'm sure it's taught much more in depth now.

The story of abolition seemed to be the main part of what we were taught from what I remember.