In PBS' opinion, Finding Your Roots needs to do a little soul-searching.
The public television purveyor announced Wednesday that it has postponed the upcoming third season of the Henry Louis Gates Jr.-hosted series and won't commit to a fourth until the show improves its editorial guidelines, determining that FYR violated PBS standards by allowing Ben Affleck to influence content that ultimately aired in an episode about the Oscar winner's lineage.
The Affleck episode will also be removed from all of PBS' methods of distribution, including DVDs and digital platforms.
Gates said in a statement that he was working with PBS on a new set of guidelines to ensure increased transparency and apologized for letting PBS initially defend the show's editorial decision to not include the finding that Affleck had an ancestor who owned slaves.
A rep for Affleck had no further comment on the matter, but the actor-filmmaker admitted on Facebook when word got out (via the Sony email hack, when a number of leaked emails were published by Wikileaks) that he was simply embarrassed by the show's findings.
"I didn't want any television show about my family to include a guy who owned slaves. I was embarrassed," he wrote. "The very thought left a bad taste in my mouth.
"Skip [Gates] decided what went into the show. I lobbied him the same way I lobby directors about what takes of mine I think they should use. This is the collaborative creative process. Skip agreed with me on the slave owner but made other choices I disagreed with. In the end, it's his show and I knew that going in. I'm proud to be his friend and proud to have participated."