AP Photo/Reed Saxon6:44 p.m.: The cast of Roots, we're told, is available for questions.
6:45 p.m.: How can you ask questions of the cast of Roots when you really just want to stare reverently?
6:50 p.m.: That Cicely Tyson isn't a legend—she's a pistol. She corrects a reporter who refers to the assembled actors as guys. "Leslie Uggams and I," she enunciates in that precise way she enunciates, "are ladies."
6:53 p.m.: Even with the TV sound down, comic Lewis Black is shouting so loud on the telecast he's threatening to drown out LeVar Burton, currently on a riff back here about the Barack Obama presidential campaign.
6:53 p.m.: Tyson's at it again. This time she's taking on Burton over whether Roots was TV's first miniseries. Burton suggests it was one of the first; Tyson insists it was the first. "It started that format," she declares.
6:54 p.m.: Who's going to tell Tyson that the likes of Rich Man, Poor Man and Upstairs, Downstairs were doing the miniseries thing before Roots took root? Not I.
—Filed by Joal Ryan