First I want to point out that the revelation that Alex Haley plagiarized part of his novel and the allegations that he largely fabricated his family history are irrelevant to an evaluation of this program. Whatever the degree of truthfulness in Haley's work, Roots had completed its transformation from history into hackneyed fiction when it came to television screens. That should be obvious to any viewer who can manage to see through all the hype. The later episodes are standard issue TV entertainment for the time, on a par with Gun Smoke or Little House on the Prairie.<br /><br />But the earlier episodes don't come off too well either. In the first episode a scene is added for no other apparent reason than to allow O.J. Simpson a cameo. I cringed when I saw Simpson running across the African grasslands, not because of his subsequent notoriety, but because of the very unsubtle association between African ancestry and modern day athletic prowess. The producers also apparently feared, perhaps correctly, that they would lose audience share if they didn't have white faces on the screen every fifteen minutes. And so the moral anguish of the slave-ship's captain (Edward Asner) is given as much importance as the ordeal of the Africans in chains below decks. In another gratuitous scene, we see Kunta Kinte's master (Robert Reed) having a tryst with his sister-in-law (Linda Day George). That scene is pure trash, especially when George tells Reed that she would like to be a "darkie" so that he would come to her cabin and take her.<br /><br />Given the film's "all-star" cast, it's not surprising that the performances are of very uneven quality. Levar Burton, Cicely Tyson, Ben Vereen as the young Chicken George, and Olivia Cole are excellent. As Kunta's grandmother, Maya Angelou seems to be channeling, well, Maya Angelou. (The subtext of her performance is "Look at me!") The white actors are second rate at best.<br /><br />Thirty years after Roots, it's time for white and black viewers alike to forget this tripe and read a few history books.