Roots (2016)

It has been quite a while since I’ve seen the original Roots miniseries, so it seemed a good time to check out this newer rendition. In the heavily fictionalized account of his family history, Alex Haley laid out the tale of how his first ancestor, Kunta Kinte, came to America on a slave ship proceeding through the generations to Haley himself. While overall I think I like the earlier version of the story, there were some highlights to this series. The budget for this seemed much higher, resulting in a higher quality and more realistic looking product. The sets in Gambia were more extravagant and portrayed a people less uncivilized than previous. One big issue I had was with the torture porn aspects of the slavery chapters. It somehow overwhelms the more everyday degradations and cruelty of slavery by only showing the extremes.