Hello and welcome to This Day, a history show from Radiotopia. My name is Jody Avergan.

It is 50 Weeks that shaped America, week six, and we are looking at the premiere of Roots in the

winter of 1977. Now we're off by a week or so with our timing the premiere of Roots in the winter of 1977.

Now, we're off by a week or so with our timing here,

but Roots did air on TV for 12 hours over eight consecutive nights

at the very end of January, 1977.

Incidentally, ABC aired it on those consecutive nights

because they were worried it would be a flop,

and they figured, let's run it in one week and basically just get it over with.

Instead, of course, it was the most watched TV show in history at the time,

an absolute sensation.

Basically the first binge-watch TV series with families rushing home in the evening

to make sure to tune in together, then spending all day the

next day in classrooms and around water cooler's discussing what they had watched. The impact of the show,

which was based on Alex Haley's book, went far beyond television, though. For the first time,

many Americans had to confront the horrors of slavery as the series begins in Africa and shows black men and

women being kidnapped, brought across the Middle Passage and to the American South.

The show then traces the life of one enslaved man in particular, Kinta Kinta Kinta, played by Lovar

Burton, and then seven generations of his family through enslavement to emancipation.

This was all happening in the wake of the bicentennial in 1976, which was a moment when the

country checked in with the story of itself, and Roots offered an enormous corrective to the

story of slavery. It also, as we'll get into, set off a genealogy craze that I would say

...