In 1977 the miniseries Roots was screened in Australia. I was ten and I remember watching some of it with my parents. Based on Alex Haley’s book of his own family history (we had that on our shelves too – it had sold 6 million copies in the US) the miniseries tells the story of Haley’s slave ancestor Kunta Kinte, kidnapped in Africa and taken to America in the 18th century.
The epic story, told in 12 hours of television, continues through the 19th century, taking in the American Civil War and the emancipation of the slaves. Told from the perspective of the slaves themselves the show is brutal and violent, which is why I wasn’t allowed to watch all of it. But I remember the sense that it was important.
The cultural impact of Roots was huge – it became the most watched miniseries in US history. An estimated 100 million people in the US watched the final episode on the ABC network. Some figures suggest 85% of all houses with TVs tuned in. It is the 10th most watched program on Australian television ever (if you take aggregate Sydney and Melbourne figures), Diana’s funeral being the most watched. Here it was broadcast on Channel 10 at 8.30 on a Sunday night, slotted between the now-retro classics The Six Million Dollar Man and The FBI.
In 2016 Roots has been re-made in the US by The History Channel and is being screened on SBS. Some of the original cast, including the actor LeVar Burton who played Kunta Kinte, are involved, and while the new version runs for only eight hours, there is apparently greater historical detail, including more background on Kunta Kinte’s life in Gambia, West Africa.
Roots 2016 has been acclaimed in the US. Critics there have described it as a program for our times, the age of #BlackLivesMatter. But as the New York Times wrote about this new version, what it can’t do is command an audience, because nothing can: “a generation of viewers – whatever we looked like, wherever we came from, wherever we ended up – carried the memory of Kunta having his name beaten out of him.”
SBS is clearly working hard to publicise Roots. I’ve seen photos of Malachi Kirby, the young actor playing Kunta Kinte, on the sides of buses and on billboards. Perhaps you have already seen the show’s trailer shared through social media feeds. I expect there will be opinion pieces like this one writing about race in America and what has changed for Indigenous Australians since 1977. It’s possible that #Roots will trend on twitter. But everyone knows that far fewer viewers will spend eight hours of their lives immersed in this saga than did almost 40 years ago.
The mass audience for television, or anything at all except sport, isn’t what it used to be. This isn’t news; of course we all know about the fragmentation of audiences as groups of viewers, or consumers of culture, turn themselves into niches, demographic slices or fan bases, communicating with each other directly through social media.
We might watch a television screen in the living room sitting next to other people but more likely we’ll watch on our laptops, tablets or smartphones snapchatting, facebooking, tweeting and instagramming all the while. US journalism academic Jay Rosen wrote about this transformation a decade ago in a piece called “The People Formerly Known as the Audience”.
We’re all those people now. I’m the last person wanting to reminisce about ye olde pre-Internet times, not least as there are better shows to watch now than our options on that Sunday night Roots was first broadcast here in 1977. Home viewing alternatives that evening were the BBC’s costume drama The Duchess of Duke Street on the ABC, a miniseries about Howard Hughes on Channel 9 and a movie called Kansas City Bomber on Channel 7. VCRs wouldn’t arrive until the following year.
The fragmentation of the form – into digital, cable, streaming, boxed sets, time-shifting – has revolutionised television content for the better. Producers don’t need to rely on massive network audiences. We are no longer in an era of scarcity. Audiences are the beneficiaries with smarter and more diverse programs than my 10 year-old self could have imagined in 1977.
Yet part of me can’t help wondering how our national conversation might change if two million or more Australians joined me in watching Roots over the coming weeks. What if it became what used to be known as “a major television event”?
White Australia is more willing to engage with questions of race and racism than we were in 1977, sometimes for the worse but mainly for the better. But it’s easy to forget the terrible weight of history and its impact on race relations every moment of every day. The story of Kunta Kinte and his descendants might help to remind us.
Roots starts screening on SBS on 27 July at 8.30pm.
