A Super Sequel to Haley's Comet

By Frank Rich

Roots: The Next Generations. ABC. In seven parts beginning Feb. 18

The first time around, no one saw it coming.

When the first episode of Roots aired on Jan. 23, 1977, there were no signs that a phenomenon was in the making. Not only had ABC'S mini-series been dismissed in advance by many TV critics, but it had already been rated as a long shot by the programmers and admen who run network television. Up to the last minute there were plenty of commercial spots for sale on Roots. ABC itself projected only a passable 28% to 31% share of the audience for the show; CBS and NBC concurred, scheduling only routine fare against it. Not for the first time, Television Row's conventional wisdom was completely wrong.

By the end of its seven-night run, Roots had piled up an average 66% audience share--some 130 million viewers --and become the most watched TV program ever. It also galvanized the country. Suddenly both the history of slavery and genealogy were national obsessions. Theaters and restaurants emptied out during the show; hundreds of colleges started Roots courses; the National Archives in Washington found itself flooded by citizens' requests for information about their ancestors. Writer Alex Haley, whose search for his African heritage had led to the book that led to Roots, became a folk hero. A TV smash hit became a cultural landmark.

Now, a scant two years later, ABC is attempting to make lightning strike twice -- and now everyone is on the alert. When Roots: The Next Generations opens its seven-night run on Sunday, Feb. 18, both audiences and the TV industry will be judging the offspring against its towering parent. Expectations are running high. Commercial time has been sold out for weeks, at $210,000 to $260,000 a minute (compared with $120,000 to $150,000 for Roots 1). The series has already been sold to 20 countries. CBS and NBC will not be caught napping again; their fierce counterprogramming gambits have turned Roots 11 week into one of the most competitive ratings races in TV history. Should ABC be vanquished, the failure would be a colossal embarrassment: budgeted at $16.6 million and running 14 hours, Roots 11 is nearly three times as costly as and two hours longer than the original.

On the quality of the show itself, ABC has nothing to worry about. In almost every way -- acting, direction, dramatic and historical sophistication -- the sequel is superior. Like Roots I, Roots:

The Next Generations is not art or, for that matter, definitive history, but it is a show-biz tour de force. An exceedingly clever and affecting soap opera, Roots II manages to play on the most basic sentimental feelings about democratic ideals and familial love. When, in the final hours, the tale turns to Alex Haley's career, it also becomes an irresistible American success story. Taken as a whole, Roots 11 is a compendium of pop cul ture: it mixes elements of Gone With the Wind, Uncle Tom 's Cabin, March of Time newsreels, Horatio Alger sto ries and even Fiddler on the Roof.

The show has its lapses, but they are amusing rather than offensive. When Episode Six inexplicably dramatizes the young Haley's first visit to a brothel, it is time to take a break and send out for pizza. This too is a legitimate part of the fun of any fully satisfying TV viewing experience.

Roots 11 begins in 1882, twelve years after the close of Roots I, and ends in 1967, the year Alex Haley went to Africa to search for traces of his ancestor Kunta Kinte. In the hours be tween, the show charts the lives of four generations of the author's family. The first segment ends with the death of Kun ta Kinte's grandson, Chicken George (Avon Long); by the final episode the viewer has briefly seen Haley's own chil dren. As before, public events are dramatized in terms of their effect on one black family. But the post-Civil War his tory covered by Roots 11 is less melodramatic than the slavery era chronicled in Roots 1. As Producer Stan Margulies, 58, explained to TIME Correspondent Robert Goldstein: "If the first series was about the struggle for freedom, this Roots is about the struggle for equality. There is a big but subtle difference. None of us lived 200 years ago: you could watch the first Roots and say 'I wouldn't act like that.' In the new group of shows, you have to look at yourself in the mirror."

Even for a 14-hour miniseries, Roots 11 covers a huge amount of ground. Ha ley's family members witness the rise of the Jim Crow South and the Ku Klux Klan, both World Wars, the race riots of the Wilson era and the hard times of the Depression. They endure the outright segregation of the Old South and the de facto segregation of the modern North. They contend with racist military officers, hypocritical white liberals, and Uncle Tom blacks. They wrestle with the political and sociological imperatives of such thinkers as Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois and Malcolm X. Yet intimate matters of life, love and death always come ahead of civics lessons or historical fine points.

For all the success of Roots 1, the show's creators have resisted the urge to become pompous and preachy in Roots 11.

Instead, they offer a parade of fine actors in a series of theatrically powerful scenes. Georg Stanford Brown, returning as Chicken George's proud son, Tom Har vey, has a wrenching moment when he undergoes an insulting literacy test before a hostile audience of rednecks.

Henry Fonda, as a relatively benign Southern aristocrat, breaks down and calls his son (Richard Thomas) a nigger when the boy marries a black (Fay Hauser). Paul Winfield, as a black college president, puts on a humiliating minstrel act to raise money from a socialite philanthropist (Dina Merrill). Ossie Davis and Brock Pe ters turn up as, respectively, a Pull man porter and a sharecropper, who risk their jobs to fight for economic equality. In his first TV performance, Marlon Brando appears in the final episode as American Nazi Party Leader George Lincoln Rockwell.

When Haley (James Earl Jones) interviews him for Playboy, Brando devilishly sprays his office with disinfectant and sings racist jingles.

All these characters are woven into a plot that courts coincidence and irony with Dickensian abandon.

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.

Once again Roots' producers recruited a largely black crew for the show, as well as some black directors (Actor Georg Stanford Brown, Yale Drama School's newly appointed dean, Lloyd Richards). A conscious and highly successful effort was made to upgrade the level of acting, black and white. "The first time we were going to give you every reason to watch he show by loading the cast with TV stars," says Stoddard. "This time we put a greater emphasis on performance." Once the actors arrived on the set, they worked hard and fast. Harewood, 28, an actor of enormous range who ages 50 years in the lengthy role of Alex's father, had to get by on three hours' sleep to keep up with memorizing his lines. Says he: "That constant struggle alone made me look 20 years older."

The sequel's producers had virtually no trouble recruiting the cast they wanted. Some prominent athletes--Decathlon Champion Rafer Johnson and former U.S.C. Running Back Anthony Davis --volunteered to play minor roles. Cafe Pianist-Singer Bobby Short flew to Los Angeles on a few days' notice to play himself in an early 1960s literary party scene. The biggest coups by far were the casting of James Earl Jones and Marlon Brando. Jones had originally been lined up to play Chicken George in Roots 1. Had he done so, he would not have been usable as Haley in Roots 11. But Jones pulled out of the first series because of a scheduling conflict and was available this time. That was lucky: with his natural air of authority, easy warmth and physical resemblance to Haley, this actor was the only obvious candidate for the show's crucial role.

Brando's entrance into Roots 11 began when he called the real-life Haley out of the blue. "I'd never met the man," says Haley. "He told me that I performed a great service for people with my book and that, in appreciation, he'd like to take a part in the film." But what part? Brando told Margulies, "I want to play a small but startling role. I want to be on long enough so that people will say, yes, that's really Marlon up there. But not too long, Because I don't want that much work." Yet once Brando agreed to play Rockwell, he wanted to add more dialogue to enhance the scene. At rehearsal he confronted Margulies. "I want to know right now," Brando demanded, "why we can't have two days, three days or whatever it takes." Rather nervously, the producer put his foot down, saying that he could only afford one day of Brando. The actor went into a sulk, took a long pause, and then announced: "In that case I'm going to ask a question I've never asked in my entire career. How early can I start?"

Brando started at 7:45 a.m. and finished eleven hours later, feeling exhilarated. "I don't believe it," he said. "I've never done eight pages [of script] in one day." Margulies was also exuberant. "Working with Brando," he says, "was as improbable as having spent some time with the tooth fairy."

The creators of Roots 11 have only one remaining wish, and it cannot be granted by the tooth fairy. The wish, of course, is for high ratings. ABC research predicts an audience within six share points of Roots 1, but other network observers feel that Haley's comet could sputter slightly this time out. While the original Roots aired during a tame ratings period, Roots 11 appears at the peak of a Nielsen "sweeps" month, the all important period that determines advertising rates charged by network affiliate stations. NBC and CBS are spending $2 million each to combat Roots 11's premiere with first-run showings of, respectively, American Graffiti and Marathon Man. Later in the week, NBC'S Fred Silverman will combat Roots with the final episodes of his own miniseries, Backstairs at the White House and a remake for TV of From Here to Eternity. Says one TV producer, noting the options: "Freddie literally risks ripping families apart when he programs the way he does against Roots."

If there is any night when Roots 11 sets a new audience record, it is likely to be Sunday, Feb. 25, when the final episode goes up against a re-run of The Sound of Music (NBC) and Celebrity Challenge of the Sexes (CBS). The victory would be just, for the last two hours of Roots: The Next Generations are about as good as television gets. Besides containing the 8 1/2-minute Brando-Jones confrontation, this segment recounts Haley's collaboration with Malcolm X on the Black Muslim's classic autobiography. As played by Al Freeman Jr. and written (in nine drafts) by Kinoy, Malcolm is the first black radical ever to be portrayed as an intelligent, three-dimensional character on television.

It is Malcolm's obsession with his African roots--the "X" stands for his unknown African name--that drives Haley forward on his search for his forefather Kunta Kinte. What happened when Haley finally went to Africa has already passed into American legend, but the reenactment of the scene at the end of Roots 11 still has strong impact. When a tribal oral historian, a griot, confirms the Haley family account of Kinte's capture by white 18th century slave traders, Alex's joy is overwhelming. "You old African! I found you! I found you! I found you! I found you!" shouts out James Earl Jones, his voice bursting with sobs. The TV audience may well sob along with him. Now as before, Roots occupies a special place in the history of our mass culture: it has the singular power to reunite all Americans, black and white, with their separate and collective pasts.

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