“Roots”

6 p.m. today through Thursday on History, Lifetime and A&E

ST. FRANCISVILLE, LA. >> Cannons boomed, shaking the leaves off 50-foot trees. “Ready, I need fire on that hill!” an urgent voice yelled. Weapons were reloaded. Exhausted infantrymen — black, white, young, old — were splayed around a muddy pit. “Watch your muzzles, gentlemen,” their leader called. “Don’t blow your friend’s face off!”

In a wooded grove in this town near Baton Rouge, La., a television crew was meticulously re-creating the brutal Civil War battle of Fort Pillow for a remake of “Roots,” the seminal miniseries about slavery. The carnage in the fight was significant: After Union soldiers surrendered, the Confederates disproportionately took white soldiers hostage as prisoners of war and slaughtered hundreds of black soldiers, sending survivors into the slave trade. This massacre was not in the original “Roots,” broadcast in 1977, which is exactly why the producers of the new one chose to include it.

It is one of many unexpected historical details put on-screen in “Roots,” which will air over four nights starting Memorial Day. It will be simulcast on the History, Lifetime and A&E channels, with a sprawling cast that includes Laurence Fishburne, Forest Whitaker, Anika Noni Rose, Anna Paquin, the rapper T.I., and English newcomer Malachi Kirby as Kunta Kinte, the central character. The revival aims to deliver a visceral punch of the past to a younger demographic, consumed anew by questions of race, inequality and heritage. With a crew of contemporary influencers — Will Packer (“Straight Outta Compton”) is a producer; Questlove oversaw the music — the hope is to recontextualize “Roots” for the Black Lives Matter era, a solemn and exacting feat.

“I’d be lying if I said I had zero trepidation and nervousness,” said LeVar Burton, who began his career, indelibly, as the slave Kunta Kinte and who serves as a producer on the modern version. “But I do believe that we have a lot to contribute to the very important conversation of race in America and how it continues to hold us back as a society.”

“Roots” is based on the best-selling Pulitzer Prize-winning 1976 book by Alex Haley, in which he traced his own ancestors to Gambia in West Africa and following their path to the United States as slaves. It occupies a singular place in American cultural history and remains one of the most popular television series ever: Its finale, on ABC, was watched by an estimated 100 million people. And it marked one of the first times that a mass viewing audience was asked to contemplate the legacy of slavery from an African-American perspective. In its wake, generations took a new interest in their own genealogy; even the word “roots” came to be associated with identity.

So why remake it?

That was the question Burton and many others asked of Mark Wolper, an executive producer and the main force behind it. His father, David Wolper, produced the original “Roots.” As the rights were passed down, the younger Wolper rebuffed many remake offers, he said. But when he tried to watch it anew with his children a few years ago, he came to a surprising conclusion: His father’s “Roots” was no longer good enough. It didn’t connect.

It was a landmark, to be sure, but its performance style and production values are dated. “The makeup is terrrrrible,” Burton said.

And with nearly 40 years of scholarship since the original, there was new information about the atrocities of the era, the societies of western Africa and the daily life of the enslaved. As much as it was presented as a history lesson, the first “Roots” got some things wrong.

In this version, accuracy is at the forefront, Wolper said one day last fall in his production office in New Orleans, where the walls were covered with images of slave ships, plantation houses and African beads. “I’m not being modest here,” he said. “We have to make it better than the first ‘Roots.’ Otherwise, why bother?”

The creators hired historians as advisers, like Stephanie Smallwood, an assistant professor at the University of Washington and an expert on the Middle Passage, the treacherous, monthslong journey of the enslaved across the Atlantic.

In the 1970s, Smallwood said, the basics of the slave trade, like its size, were still emerging. Now research has revealed that “it’s not just the largest, but it’s the most complex migration in modern history,” she said, adding that there is also a more nuanced understanding of its human cost. “It doesn’t rely solely on the symbolism of shackles. That’s a very profound part of the experience, but I think we also think more in terms of the social violence of being separated from your entire genealogy in Africa.”

That is a rift “Roots” tries to highlight, with a new understanding about the real Kunta Kinte, now said to be an educated young man from a prominent, well-to-do family, who lived not in a remote village (as depicted in the 1977 version), but on the shore of a bustling trading post. “He spoke probably four languages,” Wolper said.

His characterization changed, too: While Burton’s is a headstrong naif, the new Kunta is “a little tougher, a little edgier,” Wolper said, in what he hoped would be a more contemporary spin. Although one of the iconic images of the original was Burton in shackles, in promotions for this one — “focused thematically more on defiance, resistance and the ability to overcome the shackles of the body,” Wolper said — Kunta Kinte is shown breaking through his chains.

For Kirby, the 26-year-old actor who plays him, it was intimidating, from the audition on. “I spent more time worrying about what would happen if I got the part than actually preparing for it,” he said. He had seen “Roots” a few years earlier, after his mother gave him the boxed set, “and I was still impacted by it,” he said. He first heard of Kunta, he recalled, as a schoolboy: “It was a name that people used to curse me, if ever my hair was particularly messy.”

After he landed the role, Kirby and Burton had an emotional meeting. Filming the scene of Kunta being whipped until he says his slave name, Toby — a scene seared in many people’s memory — Kirby drew on Burton’s words. He said that before he made “Roots” he was a mighty boy and afterward “a mighty man.” (In the retelling, Kunta Kinte is played by one actor; in the original, John Amos played him as an adult.)

Describing the shoot months later in a phone interview, Kirby said, “‘Intense’ is an understatement.”

“It wasn’t all horrible,” he added. “There were some very beautiful moments, and moments of joy and elation, but there were also moments, and I think it was necessary, of torment and pain.”

Mario Van Peebles, director of the second episode, said, “There were days, honestly, where I had to go home and sometimes have a good cry and say, God, I am so blessed that these people found their way out of it.”

For much of the cast, “Roots” felt personal. “As a young brown person, it’s almost a rite of passage,” said the actor Rege-Jean Page, who grew up between London and Harare, Zimbabwe. “Somebody will sit you down in front of ‘Roots’ and say, ‘You need to watch this.’” (Characters from “Roots” have also made regular appearances in hip-hop over the years, like “King Kunta,” by Kendrick Lamar.)

Page plays Chicken George, the grandson of Kunta (Ben Vereen in the original), and the role meant a heightened sense of responsibility, he said, “because there is a story to be told that is underrepresented and misrepresented, again and again.” In an interview on the Civil War set in St. Francisville, La., he spoke not in his own voice, but in his character’s Southern accent. The part was “massively hard to shake off,” he said, months afterward, still clad in George’s shoes.

Recently there has been a small burst of entertainment, from the Academy Award-winning “12 Years a Slave” to the television series “Underground,” that has shown other sides of antebellum life, even as there is some pushback to revisiting that era. “I know there are a lot of people who are tired of the slave narrative,” said Rose, the Tony Award-winning actress who plays Kizzy, Kunta’s daughter. “With regard to black people, I think they are tired of seeing themselves enchained and downtrodden.” But those depictions, she added, were often one-sided and designed to humiliate. “I think what it is time to move past is shame, embarrassment, guilt.” Anybody who survived slavery did so “with a fortitude of superhero proportions.”

In researching her role, she listened to slave narratives collected in the Library of Congress, but new understanding about Gambian life was also “invaluable,” she said. There was “civilization, scholarship, lineage and royalty before the Africans were stolen and brought to these shores,” she said.

Almost no one involved with “Roots” imagines it will have the same seismic impact, let alone the ratings, of the original — the culture and media landscape are too different. But on a much smaller scale, it could still succeed, as the original did, in making history less abstract.

That has already happened for Kirby, the young star. “I don’t know where I come from past my grandparents,” who are Jamaican, he said. “So the idea that that kind of knowledge of self could empower you so much really spoke to me.” He has started researching his roots. “I’m hoping that will give me some insight,” he said, “into who I am today.”

© 2016 The New York Times Company