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Positive:
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Mixed:
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Negative:
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Critic Reviews
May 31, 2016
Season 1 Review:
Throughout, this new Roots is great entertainment, full of action and romance, an engrossing yarn about people who feel very real and relatable. But just as the original “Roots” had a powerful emotional impact on Americans, the new one is likely to do so as well, especially given that questions of race are at the forefront of discussion as much now as ever.
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May 25, 2016
Season 1 Review:
The miniseries may veer into obvious melodrama from time to time, especially in the latter two nights, but the fact that it never loses credibility owes to the care with which the moral bases of the characters are created. ... The performances are staggering throughout the entire miniseries.
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May 25, 2016
Season 1 Review:
A propulsive, plot-driven narrative and performances remarkable for their emotional depth and physicality keep you constantly engaged. A strong imagination for the slave experience—their ambivalence about the Revolutionary War; their attitudes about love, family, religion—yields dramatic richness and cultivates great empathy.
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May 25, 2016
Season 1 Review:
The story is as relevant as ever, cinematically more stunning and historically more accurate than the original. The casting is again superlative--Forest Whitaker as “Fiddler,” Jonathan Rhys Meyers as villain Tom Lea, James Purefoy, Anika Noni Rose and Laurence Fishburne are just the start.
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May 26, 2016
Season 1 Review:
It’s more urgent and visceral, the blood more copious, the agony more intense. This Roots doesn’t flinch, but you almost certainly will. The cast is first-rate, too. ... But this Roots can’t quite escape the faults of the original. Kunta’s story, the Fiddler’s, and later Chicken George’s, are patterns, and also cycles. They seek dignity, but find only indignity--or abject cruelty--over and over.
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May 31, 2016
Season 1 Review:
This is a more intimate series, with extended looks at the personal relationships of the characters (the connection between Kizzy and her master’s niece, who grew up together, is just one example). It’s also a gorier series—yes, showing all the abuse put to slaves, but also showing many of the perpetrators of that violence getting their comeuppance. Added to flashbacks and spiritually charged dreams, this lends the show an occasional shade of magical realism.
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May 27, 2016
May 27, 2016
Season 1 Review:
The miniseries remains difficult to watch, as Kunta Kinte and his descendants keep being victimized by white slave-owners, slave-catchers and land-owners who regard slaves as property, not as men, women and children. But Roots gains in power. Though at times, the story seems to blame the institution of slavery on sadistic white racists, as the miniseries goes on, it makes it clear that slavery remains America's original sin.
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May 26, 2016
Season 1 Review:
The miniseries is filled with superb, lived-in performances, but especially by Kirby, Page, Rose, Whitaker, and Meyers. The cast (which also includes, at various points, Mekhi Phifer, T.I., Chad L. Coleman, Erica Tazel, Anna Paquin, James Purefoy, Matthew Goode, and Sedale Threatt Jr., among many others) and crew had an impossible task in front of them, and they rose to the challenge.
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TV Guide MagazineMay 20, 2016
Season 1 Review:
A slickly streamlined and impeccably cast reinterpretation. [23 May-3 Jun 2016, p.14]
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