The first Roots ended with emancipation. This one begins with the question of what emancipation was worth in the American South, and it takes eight decades to answer.

Roots: The Next Generations picks the family up in 1882, where the 1977 miniseries left them, and follows Kunta Kinte's descendants in Henning, Tennessee, through to 1967. Alex Haley supplied the material: the last seven chapters of his 1976 novel Roots: The Saga of an American Family, plus additional writing done for the screen. ABC ran it in February 1979.

The money shows. At $16.6 million the production cost close to three times the original, and most of that went into holding a long stretch of period ground, from the post-Reconstruction South hardening into Jim Crow to the middle of the twentieth century. Olivia de Havilland, Harry Morgan, Greg Morris, Marc Singer, Debbi Morgan and Paul Koslo appear across an ensemble that keeps handing the story forward as one generation gives way to the next.

The register is sober rather than stirring, and that is the point. Each era arrives with its own rules about what a Black family in Tennessee can own, say, marry into and expect, and the series sets those rules down in order so you can see how slowly they moved. For viewers who came to the 1977 miniseries for the story of one man taken from Africa, this is the longer account of what his line inherited.