African American Lives: Listening to Our Past

African American Lives: Listening to Our Past
February 1, 2006
PBS
Documentary
DVD
B-

Henry Louis Gates looks at the family trees of prominent African-Americans, searching for common threads of the black experience in America.  To be honest, it's the connecting the dots aspect that's the weakest, and what's best is when he lets the celebrities and their families simply tell their stories, without over-interpreting them.  (Look, Chris Tucker's great-grandfather saved a whole little town for 40 years, in defiance of the Northern Migration!  Yeah, we get that.)  I'm hoping that the flaw is mostly due to this being a first episode and Gates will spend less time on set-up in the remaining three episodes.  (It looks like the series was revived in '08, but that's not on this disc.)

Gates co-wrote this series with Shebana Coelho and Kelly Quinn.  Jesse Sweet directed.