Word: slaving
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Rivals Humbled. ABC, which had risked $6 million on the production starring LeVar Burton as Kunta Kinte, Lou Gossett as his slave tutor, and a clutch of familiar TV veterans, humbled its network rivals in a week-long domination of the Nielsen ratings. Had ABC gambled even more by delaying the show until the start of the so-called sweep week on Jan. 31, the triumph would have been even sweeter. During those periods, ratings services measure the audiences of local stations, and the networks often air their strongest shows then to boost affiliate ad rates...
...could argue with Roots' impact, some scholars did find fault with its accuracy. "The manhood rite of the Mandinkan tribe took three or four years, not a couple of days," noted Dr. Andrew Billingsley, president of Morgan State University. "The series overdoes the black participation in the slave business, while it ignores the main slave traders-Europeans who came into African communities and rounded up people at gunpoint. The passage took longer, with 'seasoning' camps at the beginning, usually on an island off the African coast, and breeding camps...
...first four hours, which bring Kunta Kinte, Haley's own great-great-great-great-great-grandfather from a happy childhood in an African village to a flogging in the slave quarters of a Virginia plantation, offer almost no new insights, factual or emotional, about the most terrible days of the black experience. Instead, there is a handy compendium of stale melodramatic conventions by which, since abolitionist days, popularizers have tried to comprehend a crime so monstrous that, like the Holocaust, it is beyond anyone's ability to re-create in intelligent dramatic terms...
...always, the native tongue of the persecuted minority is rendered in English as fake-childish poetry. As always, slave-ship captains and plantation owners are shown as psychopathic hypocrites-consulting Scripture in one scene, condoning, even participating in violence and rape in the next. Naturally, a Simon Legree figure is always handy to do their dirty work, while highborn white ladies dither prettily in the background...
...first wife Josephine de Beauharnais might be expected to live a somewhat sheltered life, is violated twelve times on three continents by five men. On top of that, she gives a command performance for Napoleon, suffers a miscarriage, undergoes captivity in a Turkish harem and is sold as a slave in Louisiana. Why is the heroine subjected to all these horrors? Cynics might imagine that Marisa's martyrdom is merely intended to offer the bored middle-class female a succession of vicarious masochistic thrills, but Author Rogers seems to think that regular ravishment can raise a woman...