Television: A Super Sequel to Haley's Comet

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Estranged parents and children al ways reunite around an elder's death bed; newborn babies are always held up to a starry sky in emulation of Kunta Kinte's original African ritual. The sto ry's backbone and much of its meaning can be found in the loving relationships of Haley's grandparents (Stan Shaw and Bever-Leigh Banfield) and parents (Do rian Harewood and Irene Cara). Since these ancestors, unlike those of Roots 1, were never slaves, Roots 11 is able to dramatize normal black middle-class life — at home, work, college and war. For TV viewers weaned on The Jeffersons, their lives may come as a revelation. Roots 11 shows blacks sharing the same heart breaks, career ambitions and class conflicts as whites. A subplot about a Rus sian Jewish merchant (George Voskovec) in the South also sets up parallels between blacks and foreign immigrants as both groups deal with the problem of assimilation into American culture. But Roots 11 does not try to turn blacks into dark-skinned whites. When Haley's forebears enter middle-class professions, and even the Republican Party, they still cling to the litany of African words passed down by Kunta Kinte and keep alive the harsh legacy of slavery. The blacks of Roots 11 are different from whites, and they are proud of that difference.

Such subtleties are far removed from the oversimplifications that characterize Roots 1. "The first series was a different kind of storytelling," says ABC Vice President Brandon Stoddard, who developed both series at ABC. "The design then was good guys vs. bad guys, and there were no white good guys. In Roots 11 we're concerned with the hangover of slavery, the scars. There's less hitting the audience over the head. It's no longer 'Wow, look what we did to those people!' Now the show is about connecting with the emotional problems of Alex Haley's family."

At first the design of Roots: The Next Generations was not nearly so clear as it is now. Right after the airing of Roots 1, Stoddard, Margulies and Executive Producer David Wolper were reluctant to make a sequel. Little by little, however, they started exploring the possibilities: Haley began dictating family recollections into a tape recorder to expand the 40-page modern section of his book. Once Haley had spilled 1,000 pages of memories, Television Writer Ernest Kinoy (The Defenders, Playhouse 90) got to work on a "bible" for the show. Kinoy turned in a 350-page outline, and ABC gave the go-ahead for the production.

It was a mammoth undertaking. "Each show is like a period movie made in 18 days," explains John Erman, who directed three episodes. The sets are lavish and the money was intelligently spent. Interiors have accurate period furnishings and products. Such minor locations as a 1930s gas station, where young Alex is barred from the men's room, are as full of vivid details as the Dust Bowl sets in Bonnie and Clyde. At a cost of $1.8 million, ABC built the town of Henning, Tenn., where Haley's family settled at the end of Roots 1, and updated its streets and buildings for each decade. Though the African sequences and World War 1 battles were shot in California 'at the Los Angeles Arboretum and in Valencia), the sanitized sitcom look of Roots 1's much criticized African sets is gone.