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.
The peaks and the valleys. Find the essential episodes — and the ones to skip.
Guests: Gaby Hoffmann and Téa Leoni. Two guests whose lives have been shaped by family mysteries are introduced to biological ancestors they never knew they had thanks to genetic detective work.
Guests: Questlove, Dr. Phil and Charlayne Hunter-Gault. Three guests of disparate backgrounds dig into their Southern roots, where slavery and its aftermath shaped families both black and white.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. welcomes Brittany Packnett Cunningham and Anita Hill, two guests who made profound sacrifices for social justice, and helps them discover the ancestors who made sacrifices for them.
Basketball superstars Brittney Griner and Chris Paul reveal that they are not the first extraordinary people in their family trees. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. uncovers relatives who showed courage, talent and grit.
Each point is an episode, plotted in order. Colored bands mark season boundaries. Look for the rise, the plateau, or the decline.
High votes + high rating = beloved classic. High votes + low rating = notorious stinker. Low votes + high rating = hidden gem.
One point per season. Smooths out the episode-to-episode noise to reveal the bigger arc.
Did each season build or fizzle? Green means the finale outscored the premiere. Red means the opposite. Longer arrows, bigger swings.
How steady is each season? Tightly clustered dots mean reliable quality. Scattered dots mean a wild ride.
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