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The 30-second pitch: "It can’t be easy to watch. Otherwise, we would have been dishonest to the history," says producer Mark Wolper of the four-night, eight-hour miniseries, a gritty, powerful remake of the iconic 1977 original that was produced by his father, David. The update, starring Malachi Kirby as Kunta Kinte, as well as Forest Whitaker, Laurence Fishburne, Mekhi Phifer, Anika Noni Rose, Anna Paquin, James Purefoy, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Chad Coleman, and Derek Luke, has another father-son connection: Wolper says he had been reluctant to remake the mini until his 16-year-old son refused to watch the original. "He said, 'Daddy, I understand why it’s important, but it’s like your music. It doesn’t speak to me,'” Wolper recalls. "Why not translate it to the language of today? Why not now make this Roots the best that it can be for 2016? It is our history. We all must know our history."

The scene: As it was when original miniseries star LeVar Burton (an executive producer on the remake) played Kunta Kinte, the whipping scene, when Kunta is beaten until he will publicly identify himself by his slave name, is harsh and heartbreaking. "If I was to pick the hardest day as a whole, for many reasons, I believe it was the whipping scene, in regards to how far that pushed me as a human in telling the truth of that scene," Kirby says. "It was horrible, and it needed to be. The cameras stopped rolling, and I couldn’t get up. It wasn’t a physical pain, it was a pain of having your identity beaten out of you, having your name literally beaten out of you. We spent a whole day on that scene. I didn’t want any one of my cries to be a performance. Every time I screamed it was coming from a place beyond me." — Kimberly Potts

(Credit: Steve Dietl/History)