Part 1

It is a good miniseries and I do recommend it for everyone, except young children. But it fails to make the audience love the characters like the original miniseries did. They move too quickly for plot points and character building moments and I rarely felt any sort of affection or connection to anyone, not even Kunta who is of course the protagonist of the story. I like that they spent a little more time on the city and culture of Kuntas homeland, and that they deleted a whole lot of unnecessary nonsense about the slave traders themselves. That material always seemed to take away from the real story. But they also gloss over a lot of African relationships and interactions that made the first and second episode of the original Roots so memorable. In the original when Fiddler finds Kunta loose from his chains there's a whole ordeal of him not only being scared but angry, and you realize these two people have just complicated their relationship. In this one it didn't feel like much of anything. I just don't care about these people the way I did before.

It's definitely more cinematic and probably more historically accurate. It's a joy to watch, but I wont be rewatching over and over like the original. There's not much in the way of feeling with the new version of Roots.