Roots
Part VII
TV Flash files “Part VII” as hour 7 of 8 in the TV Flash guide — Roots (1977) on ABC, season 1, episode 7, aired 1977-01-29, 120 min.
From the desk
How this hour is filed
This leaf is S01E07: listed hour 7 of 8 in the Roots guide, hour 7 of 8 in season 1. It aired 1977-01-29 (120 min). The listed hour before it is “Part VI” (S01E06). Next is “Part VIII” (S01E08).
Catalog log
Broadcast listing — not a TV Flash recap.
Chicken George returns to North Carolina to find his sons have married and started families - and to learn about a state law that says his status as a free man is forfeited if he stays more than 60 days. Meanwhile, the nation erupts in Civil War.
Viewer FAQ
Where does Part VII sit in the Roots guide?
S01E07 is listed hour 7 of 8 — hour 7 of 8 in season 1, season 1 episode 7.
When did Roots S01E07 air?
Part VII aired 1977-01-29 and is listed at 120 minutes.
Do I have to watch all eight parts in order?
Yes. This is a saga, not a procedural. The leads change because the decades change. Skipping a night is skipping a generation.
In the series
Why this series still plays
To see what appointment TV could do when a network spent eight nights on one family: not a pause button, not a ribbon, a week the country actually lived through together — and still argues about.
January 23, 1977, ABC did not counterprogram. It occupied. Eight consecutive nights, two-hour chapters, a family story that began in Gambia and ended in a country still arguing with itself. Roots is the last century's proof that event television was not a marketing term. It was a living room with three choices and one of them refusing to be background. Affiliates ran it. Watercoolers loaded for morning. On the palate: period craft, a cast that photographed as a nation, and a clock that did not care if you had…
Filed against
- LeVar Burton as Young Kunta Kinte
LeVar Burton’s breakthrough as young Kunta Kinte on Roots made miniseries history — eight ABC nights, event television that forced a nation to watch and talk together. Later Star Trek: TNG and Reading Rainbow sealed educator-icon status.…
- John Amos as Older Kunta Kinte
John Amos brought steel and heart as James Evans on Good Times, then became Roots event-TV royalty as the adult Kunta Kinte. A Chicago projects sitcom’s creative-control battles became industry lore; an ABC week became national weather.…
- Louis Gossett Jr. as Fiddler
Louis Gossett Jr.’s Fiddler is the first American teacher in Roots — the musician-enslaved mentor who made ABC’s eight-night 1977 event feel like a household instead of a lecture. The miniseries occupied a week the country could not…
- Leslie Uggams as Kizzy
Leslie Uggams’s Kizzy is Roots as a new lead when the decades turn — ABC’s eight-night occupation, miniseries as national weather, a family saga that required guest-star mythology without treating it as a stunt. January 1977 appointment.…
- Ben Vereen as Chicken George
Ben Vereen’s Chicken George helped make Roots event television — miniseries as cultural reckoning with ratings and conversation as one national moment. Stage-legend voltage met historical drama. TV Flash files him as a face of 1970s…