Roots is an American television miniseries based on Alex Haley's 1976 novel Roots: The Saga of an American Family. The series first aired on ABC in January 1977. Roots received 37 Primetime Emmy Award nominations and won nine. It also won a Golden Globe and a Peabody Award. It received unprecedented Nielsen ratings for the finale, which holds the record as the third-highest-rated episode for any type of television series, and the second-most-watched overall series finale in U.S. television history. It was produced on a budget of $6.6 million. A sequel, Roots: The Next Generations, first aired in 1979, and a second sequel, Roots: The Gift, a Christmas television film, starring Burton and Louis Gossett Jr., first aired in 1988. A related film, Alex Haley's Queen, is based on the life of Queen Jackson Haley, who was Alex Haley's paternal grandmother. In 2016, a remake of the original miniseries, with the same name, was commissioned by the History channel and screened by the channel on Memorial Day. Plot Colonial times In the Gambia, West Africa, in 1750, Kunta Kinte is born to Omoro Kinte (Thalmus Rasulala), a Mandinka warrior, and his wife, Binta (Cicely Tyson). He is raised in a Muslim family. When Kunta (LeVar Burton) reaches the age of 15, he and other boys undergo a semi-secretive tribal rite of passage, under the kintango (Moses Gunn), which includes wrestling, circumcision, philosophy, war-craft and hunting skills; while tasked to catch a bird unharmed, Kunta crosses paths with Gardner's small party of European slave hunters and their captives. Shortly after his ceremonial return, while fetching wood outside his village to make a drum for his younger brother, Kunta is captured by Gardner and four black collaborators. He is then sold to a slave trader and placed aboard the slave ship Lord Ligonier under the command of Capt. Thomas Davies (Edward Asner) for a three-month journey to Colonial America. During the voyage, Kunta bonds with a Mandinka wrestler (Ji-Tu Cumbuka) who was part of his manhood training, as well as a Mandinka girl named Fanta whom he met shortly before his kidnapping. An insurrection among the human cargo fails to take over the ship, but results in the death of the cruel overseer Mr. Slater (Ralph Waite), several crew members and several Africans, including the wrestler. The ship eventually arrives in Annapolis, Maryland, in 1767, where the captured Africans are sold at