Finding Your Roots

Finding Your Roots is currently streaming in Australia on Amazon Prime Video and Hoopla, and in the US on PBS and PBS Living Amazon Channel, and it treats its subject with more rigour than the format usually demands. 12 seasons in, and the quality has not slipped. Its 7/10 TMDB score, built from 20 ratings, reflects a title that consistently delivers. Worth watching in order, from the beginning — the cumulative effect is the point. Put it on tonight on Amazon Prime Video and see for yourself.

Finding Your Roots arrived without much fanfare and built its audience the hard way — through word of mouth. The access Finding Your Roots gets is remarkable — and the storytelling does full justice to it. Noted Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Has been helping people discover long-lost relatives hidden for generations within the branches of their family trees. Professor Gates utilizes a team of genealogists to reconstruct the paper trail left behind by our ancestors and the world’s leading geneticists to decode our DNA and help us travel thousands of years into the past to discover the origins of our earliest forebears. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Gives the storytelling a level of trust that shows. It ran for 12 seasons (2012–2026), and the writing holds up across every one of them. Finding Your Roots lets its subjects speak for themselves rather than shaping them into a predetermined narrative. There is real craft here, even in the moments that do not fully land.

Documentary fans who value serious storytelling will find Finding Your Roots essential viewing. Viewers who responded to Top Gear will find a lot to like here too. 12 seasons is a lot, but the quality holds all the way through. Rigorous in a way documentary work does not always commit to. Not background viewing — it rewards your full attention.

Finding Your Roots is currently airing new episodes — so there's no better time to catch up before the story moves forward. Find exactly where it's streaming below, and TV Butler Pro makes it effortless to track your progress as you go. Just search the name, and Butler finds it instantly, tells you which service has it, and remembers exactly where you left off.