Host Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and actress Melissa McCarthy while taping Finding Your Roots.
(Photo credit: Courtesy of McGee Media/Ark Media)
Today’s most compelling personalities discover the surprising stories buried within their own families in the sixth season of the critically acclaimed PBS series Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Season 6 features the ancestry stories of 27 fascinating new guests who are game-changers in their fields, with family histories that illustrate the power and diversity of the human experience.
Among them are actors Jeffrey Wright, Sigourney Weaver, Melissa McCarthy and Sterling K. Brown; groundbreaking director Jordan Peele; Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi; acclaimed journalists Gayle King and Norah O’Donnell; musicians Queen Latifah and Jon Batiste; legendary fashion designers Diane von Furstenberg, Narciso Rodriguez and Zac Posen; as well as a host of other luminaries, including Jeff Goldblum, Anjelica Huston, Isabella Rossellini, Terry Gross, Marc Maron, Eric Stonestreet, Issa Rae, Amy Ryan and Justina Machado.
Some of the guests whose stories will be revisited this season include actors Scarlett Johansson, Julianne Moore and Marisa Tomei; journalist Lisa Ling; radio talk show host Joe Madison; musician Questlove; and late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel.
Host Henry Louis Gates, Jr. with journalist Terry Gross at the New York Genealogy society. (Photo credit: Stephanie Berger for McGee Media/Ark Media)
At the center of it all, guiding every discovery, is host and executive producer Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard University and director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research.
“Hosting Finding Your Roots is not only profoundly rewarding as a scholar,” Henry Louis Gates, Jr. said. “It’s part of a larger mission to inspire us all to seek out the stories of our ancestors—to see history as something that we are all a part of, that we all have a stake in—and, in realizing this, to help us arrive at a deeper understanding of what it means to be part of the human family. Our series strives to show how all Americans are related, despite our present divisive politics, at the most fundamental levels of all: through our families, through our immigrant experiences, whether forced or voluntary, and at the level of the genome. I couldn’t be more excited to share Season Six with our viewers.”
When to Watch
The new season will premiere on CPTV on Tuesdays beginning October 8, 2019 at 8 p.m. Season 6’s extended broadcast lineup will span from fall 2019 through fall 2020. The fall 2019 season will premiere with two new episodes followed by five encore presentations of the series.
Season 6 will return in early 2020, on Tuesdays at 8 p.m. beginning January 7, with eight weeks of new episodes featuring both new guests and re-mixed thematic combinations of former participants’ stories.
Finding Your Roots then returns in fall 2020 with six additional new episodes showcasing new and re-mixed episodes.
For more information and videos from Finding Your Roots, click here.