From African villages to America’s spotlight

In “African American Lives,” which airs in four parts tonight and next Wednesday on KCET, sometimes-controversial superstar scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. takes eight illustrious black men and women on a trip into history to find out where they came from and from whom. “ ‘Roots’ for real” might have been the pitch line.

It is also a game show in which one lucky winner, whose DNA provides the most convincingly traceable match to an African population, wins a trip to a village from which his ancestors might conceivably have come. And it’s a kind of extended version of “This Is Your Life,” with Gates as Ralph Edwards, even down to the “family albums” he brings to amaze his famous “guests.”

Those guests include Oprah and Whoopi, Quincy Jones, Chris Tucker, televangelist T.D. Jakes, sociologist-author Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, astronaut Mae Jemison and pediatric neurosurgeon Ben Carson. That Gates, previously the host of the PBS series “America Beyond the Color Line” and “Wonders of the African World,” has chosen them instead of people of ordinary, or slightly more or less than ordinary, accomplishments, is part of the show’s inspirational arc -- not merely to say that black people have triumphed over adversity to accomplish great things, but that the seeds of that greatness have been handed down through the generations. (“Education is ingrained in your genes, girl!” Gates tells Oprah Winfrey, apropos her forebears.) Of course, they are salable names as well. And they are also just the people in Gates’ Rolodex.

If a little repetitious and scattered, and a tad too insistent on Moments of Surprise, it is plenty interesting and often moving, even to an old cynic who has never been motivated to part the curtains of his own past. Gates starts with his and his subjects’ parents and, triangulating genealogical research with genetic analysis and historical knowledge -- he’s got a dream team of experts working these cases -- he heads back through the foggy ruins of time, through the civil rights movement, Jim Crow, the Great Migration in which blacks left the South for the cities of the North and West, Reconstruction, slavery, “the middle passage” to America, and all the way back to Africa. There is a certain amount of best-guessing, but what they turn up is impressive, especially given the degree to which slavery stripped blacks of their identity. As we hear Malcolm X say, “What was your name and where did it go? Where did you lose it? Who took it?”

Genealogy has, of course, become something of a hot hobby, even an obsession, for many, and most of us have at least the vague notion that we are the product of something that’s gone before -- though, as “African American Lives” points out, amusingly at times, we can be completely wrong about what that might be. (Gates himself turns out to be the most surprised.) But there is something more urgent about reclaiming a history that’s been so forcibly removed.

Because of the number of individuals involved, it’s difficult to keep track of everyone’s particular story, and great-grandparents tend to blur with great-great-grandparents and great-great-great-grandparents and so on. But the show is really meant to illustrate broader historical points, along with a wondering at the science that makes such knowledge possible.

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‘African American Lives’

Where: KCET

When: 9 to 11 p.m. tonight and Feb. 8

Rating: TV-PG (may be unsuitable for young children)