Heh--not only were the details wrong, they were plagiarized, as well. Haley lost a quite large lawsuit over that plagiarizism.
It (NBC series of ROOTS) "was a lie, in two senses. Alex Haley's book, on which the miniseries was based, was a fraud---a made-up tale about his own family, leavened with plagiarized passages from a novel, The African, Harold Courlander, a white author. White editors and producers, and the white judge in Courlander's plagiarism suit, gave Haley a free ride, (Courlander won $650,000, but was told not to discuss the case.) But now black columnist Stanley Crouch admits Roots was "one of the biggest con jobs in U.S. literary history." The meta-story of Roots was almost as fraudulent as it details. The black experience in this country was woven with slavery and woe. But blacks also managed to fertilize vast tracts of the American spirit; the victims of the slave trade became triumphant cultural imperialists. America is the home of American blacks, not some lost and remote Africa. No wonder that, to tell the grim story he wanted to tell, Haley had to make up almost everything."
(source: National Review, February 11, 2002)