Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr. is on the Zoom to talk about his love of television. But because he’s a renowned historian, college professor, literary critic and Finding Your Roots host, Gates can’t help but start his Television Academy interview with a fascinating lesson about the subject at hand.
“You know, cable television was actually invented for people who lived in mountainous regions where a broadcast signal couldn’t get through,” he explains. “Young people, like my students, think it was invented for people living in New York City!” He adds that the service came to his small paper mill town of Piedmont, West Virginia, back in 1949, which meant he grew up sampling all nine available channels every day from “the time I woke up” through bedtime. “We could watch whatever people in Baltimore and Washington D.C. watched,” Gates notes, “So it cut down on this sense of being isolated in the hills.”
Gates, of course, is an expert on the past. In the eleventh season of the hit Finding Your Roots (premiering on PBS on January 7), he and his team use genealogical detective work and DNA analysis to trace the family trees of a new group of curious public figures. It turns out that Kristen Bell’s seventh great-grandfather spied for the British during the American Revolution, while her husband, Dax Shepard, is a descendent of French fur traders captured by the British during the War of 1812. Chrissy Teigen, he says, is the first person he’s ever found with ancestry to Roma gypsies.
Even after finding the roots of 300 guests since 2012, “I have never been bored once!” says Gates, also the Director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University. “I’m with these people for sometimes six hours doing the reveal so we build an intimate connection. It’s very emotional for them, and for me.”
For his My Seven Shows, Gates (call him “Skip”) unsurprisingly drew on his personal history. “When I sat down and made my list, I decided my most memorable shows are the ones that shaped me when I was young and still in school,” he says. (In fact, he says he’s thought about writing a book about television from 1950 through 1968.)
After winnowing down his favorites — and lamenting that he didn’t choose his beloved Star Trek — he gave his picks to the Television Academy.
Amos ‘N’ Andy (1951-53, CBS)