A Mighty Miniseries
KITMAN, MARVIN
On Television A MIGHTY MINISERIES BY MARVIN KITMAN one always worries about television's fidelity to the novels it turns into miniseries. I fret, for example, that ABC, purchasers of Friendly...
...This is another one of Silverman's contributions to the genre...
...Although it never quite became "How Lovely to Be a Slave if Your Massa Is Lome Greene," it got into what television likes to call "strong personal dramas...
...I can see the ads: "Get all the story we left out of the original, before we saw the high Nielsen ratings...
...Hmmm...
...Then they won't be worshipping heathen idols...
...It's like silver spoons...
...And the Kitmans weren't even here in those days...
...Some later installments had the impact of Floyd Patterson, one of the original proponents of nonviolence, if you remember his second fight with Liston...
...The lily-white television establishment stuck it to whitey good this time...
...The television rights to my grandmother's reminiscences about her days as the prima ballerina of the Royal Lithuania Dance Company have not been sold yet, either...
...Around the fifth show Roots began changing...
...It made my blood boil...
...Or don't...
...I don't know about you, but I don't feel much when I watoh most programs...
...Roots definitely delved deeper into black family life than What's Happening, ABC's previous series on the subject...
...Alex Haley's genealogical detective story, a kind of One Man's Black Family, had the usual novels-on-television blockbuster plot covering multigenerations...
...Captain Davies couldn't look at himself in the mirror...
...We did that to those poor Africans...
...His anguish looked as if it could be solved with Pepto-Bismol...
...In the end, however, a man who doesn't say No to the right questions is as great as the man who says Yes...
...Others believe in tight pack...
...He became a man in a secret ritual that inculcated him with the wisdom of the tribe...
...Despite his brilliant performances as the harried executive in the long-running Hertz commercials, he is a joke as an actor...
...It was truly a great leap forward for the network that brought us Fonzie Loves Pinky, a wimp of a typically contrived drama...
...These theories were conveyed in marvelously droll ironic manner, as if Slater were a guest on an early morning talk show on the ABC (Alabama Broadcasting Corporation) educational TV channel...
...Pound, pound, pound...
...Moreover, this wasn't some play on PBS' Visions which, great as it might be, is easily avoided...
...Unfortunately, this beautiful outlook was to prove impractical...
...All of these miniseries whisk you out of your living room for a tour of foreign lands...
...How could our forefathers have been so blind, so injust, so cruel...
...The first episode hit you like the early Sonny Liston...
...Roots was strong stuff to the end, and not merely because it was shocking...
...Hey man," you think, "those are my people, those slavers...
...For all I know, Silverman's major contribution to Roots was not saying No...
...The prospect of a cheap commer...
...It will be interesting to see whether this miniseries has any observable educative impact on its vast audiences...
...They are the Sons of the Revolution, whose families are celebrated in our history and on CBS' Bicentennial Minutes...
...Allow your foe a path for escape, for nothing is gained by killing a beaten man...
...And PBS just had one...
...Roots was prime-time commercial television, man...
...More die off in tight pack, but we start off with more...
...I fret, for example, that ABC, purchasers of Friendly Fire, C. D. B. Bryan's moving story about a Vietnam War victim, will not make it into a musical...
...cial rip-off already mars the memory of the first successful miniseries...
...In 12 hours on prime time...
...But unlike Rich Man, Poor Man, an example of the picture-postcard school of directing, Roots did not just hopscotch around the globe...
...The eight nights were a celebration of television's potential, a Chan-nukah for viewers...
...Ultimately, it uplifted and made you proud of being American...
...A few kind words might also be in order here for Stoddard's boss, Freddy Silverman, who loved The Captain & Tennille, a bomb that cost ABC $500,000 per episode (for 19 weeks), and hated Charley's Angels, the smash hit of the year...
...It was on the real people's network, ABC, where they have the hard-core culture stuff: Baretta, Starsky and Hutch and Charley's Angels...
...In addition to his other stellar qualities, Slater was also something of an anthropologist...
...The first hour sketched the early life of Haley's ancestor six times removed, Kunte Kinte of the Man-dinka tribe in what is now Gambia...
...Of course, Roots had its weaknesses...
...There's no sense nit-picking, though...
...Destroy, destroy...
...Even the best of them, though—like Rich Man, Poor Man, Captains and the Kings and QB VII, Leon Uris' kosher epic have been little more than classy soap operas...
...He was born, grew up and learned the religion and values of his father...
...In fact, many of his thoughts on race can be found in Jefferson's Notes on Virginia...
...Ed Asner was disappointing as the tortured Christian slaver...
...See Rich Man, Poor ManBook II...
...I think it's good for them...
...Actually, Slater went on to note, it's all a question of philosophy: "Some believes in loose pack...
...It's a free country...
...I left my screen that first night with an overwhelming sense of guilt...
...The best TV has been able to do in this area until now is teach us about black vocal and body language: We all know that blacks say "dynomite" and slap hands a lot on basketball courts...
...He also expounded on the advantages of their becoming Christian...
...Yet that was hardly enough of a reaction to such an immense crime...
...Roots was superb, the sort of program that can ruin television's reputation for churning out garbage...
...His views were common at University of Virginia seminars, possibly along with Thomas Jefferson's...
...It was clear from the start that, besides showing us the sights, Roots would take the time to tell us things, raw information we could't possibly integrate into our daily life...
...I don't agree with the experts who said its characterizations were too black and white...
...There are plenty of other novels around with authentic characters, deeply involving stories and uncon-trived plots...
...You say, Brandon, you want to do a miniseries on slavery...
...The Mandinka theory of warfare was to surround an opponent on three sides, not on four...
...Only Roots, which ran from January 23-30 on ABC, was a totally different experience in reading books by the light of the set...
...Was God dead in the 1760s, too...
...Still, gentle as Patterson was, I would have hated meeting him in a dark alley...
...Slater thought blacks were more rhythmic than whites, needed dancing on the deck to keep them healthy, and were especially suited for slavery...
...If you kill him, the elders explained, then his son becomes your enemy...
...As Captain Davies turned away in disgus—the was one of those tormented Christians who entered the slave trade out of necessity, not principle—the Third Mate said, "Loose pack has its points...
...Just as Kunte graduated from manhood training, he ran into a vastly more popular philosophy...
...One can imagine the battles inside the ABC corporate board rooms when the proposal for filming Haley's book was first presented...
...The Christian slave traders rescued him from his heathen environment, and what started as a leisurely examination of the cultural mores of an African tribe erupted into a story of agonizing injustice...
...and it had the necessary visual variety...
...We were, I am led to believe, in Lithuania...
...We're saving them from being eaten by their own kind...
...They don't even have no proper language...
...it had the big names in the cast—with some, like O. J. Simpson, merely of curiosity value...
...They may be exciting, amusing or fascinating...
...All this, I submit, is a lot to get out of one TV series...
...Watching Roots unfold, I realized why those hotheaded abolitionists wanted to go to war...
...The character was fake anyway, something the producers inserted to prevent the people of Scarsdale from taking to the streets, a good guy to show how impotent the system left us...
...But nothing ever upset me as much as the first two hours of Roots...
...True, most of the books put on the air the last two years have come out better than the programs they preempted...
...Kunte was taught, for example, not to kill for the sake of killing...
...Whites are bad...
...The single restraint on my praise is the fear that Roots will become a regular series in the near future...
...If any Emmy existed for TV brass it should go Brandon Stoddard—the brilliant young man-about-the-West-Coast, the resident book-reader at ABC and the Vice President in charge of the Novels-for-Television concept...
...They're bred that way, like a man breeds a dog for hunting...
...He is the fellow who pushed Roots onto the screen...
...A certain mix is most profitable, though, explained Third Mate Slater (Ralph Waite) to Captain Davies (Ed Asner), who like most viewers was new to the business—because "bucks take up more space than bitches...
...Perhaps I'll identify with or care slightly about the characters...
...It's the natural order of things...
...Nor was this a panel discussion on public TV, with a bunch of professors from Brooklyn College and Howard University sitting around wringing their hands over inequity...
...Its power was diminished slightly...
...Or was he alive but in retirement in a condominium in Spanish Florida...
...you know it's irrational, yet you despise the religious hypocrites who bartered in human life...
...But O. J. Simpson was a poor choice for the brief role of an African chieftain...
...Just grunts and groans...
...The producers must have needed a fast runner to catoh the boy Kunte Kinte...
...I learned, as a case in point, a lot of useless data about the nuts and bolts operation of the slavery racket run by the pious Christians of Mary, land, and should I ever get asked on a history test, I now know that 170 slaves is about right for the hold of a ship...
Vol. 60 • February 1977 • No. 4
