‘Good Times’ and ‘Roots’ Star Was Solid as a Rock

With all due respect to Coming to America’s Cleo McDowell — owner of an off-brand McDonald’s featuring a logo with golden arcs, not arches, and a Big Mick burger, not a Big Mac — John Amos’ two most iconic roles came more than a decade prior, in the Seventies. In 1974, CBS debuted Good Times, where Amos and Esther Rolle played James and Florida Evans, parents struggling to keep their kids’ heads above water in a Chicago housing project. After he was fired from the show for complaining that James and Florida and their realistic problems were being sidelined in favor of the caricatured antics of their teenage son JJ, he landed the lead role in the landmark miniseries Roots, where he played the older version of African-born slave Kunta Kinte, who was forced by his white captors to answer to the name Toby. 

The eras and settings were wildly different, but the men he played were unquestionably John Amos characters: solid, dependable, and alternately intimidating or gentle, depending on the situation.

Amos, whose Aug. 21 death was confirmed this week by his family, came by his impressive physical presence honestly. Years before he went into showbiz, he was an aspiring football player, who played in college for the Colorado State Rams, had tryouts with the Denver Broncos and Kansas City Chiefs of what was then the American Football League, and played on several teams in pro football’s minor leagues, like the Canton Bulldogs of the United Football League. Legend has it that Chiefs coach Hank Stram told him, “You’re not a football player; you’re a man who is trying to play football.”

But what a man he turned out to be when he dropped his athletic dreams and got into acting. In the early Seventies, he had small roles on TV shows — most notably a recurring job on The Mary Tyler Moore Show as friendly and unflappable WJM weatherman Gordy Howard — and in commercials. (He likely drew on the experience from this musical McDonald’s ad when it came time to play McDowell.) When Esther Rolle’s performance as Florida made her an early breakout character opposite Bea Arthur on Maude, the sitcom’s producers, including the legendary Norman Lear, decided to give her a husband — and, at the end of Maude Season Two, to give the duo their own show.

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Good Times was one of the first TV comedies centered on a Black nuclear family. It was meant to be in a similar vein as both Maude and All in the Family, with Florida and James wrestling with poverty, racism, and other social ills. Together, they provided a calm anchor in the tumultuous lives of their kids — and for audience members dealing with their own struggles in an America not too far removed from the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Amos could deftly trade punchlines with his co-stars, particularly whenever James was expressing disapproval towards the lazy JJ (played by comedian Jimmie Walker). But to viewers who had grown up only seeing white actors get to play idealized sitcom dads, James’ mere existence — coupled with the warm strength with which Amos played him — made him feel historic.

But it was JJ — and his frequently-yelled catchphrase, “DYN-O-MITE!” — that seemed to generate the loudest response, and soon the show began to reorient itself around him, leaving James and Florida as exasperated straight men in what was meant to be their story. Rolle and Amos both objected to this shift, frequently. Her complaints tended to be more public, while his tended to be more hostile. (“I wasn’t the most diplomatic guy in those days,” he would say years later, and his bosses “got tired of having their lives threatened over jokes.”) Amos was fired after the third season, and the fourth season began with the Evans family being confronted with tragedy, when an off-camera James died in a car accident while pursuing a job opportunity in Mississippi. (Rolle quit after that season, and without either parent around to ground things, JJ suddenly seemed much less appealing; the ratings began to drop.)

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There was a silver lining to Amos’ unexpected unemployment: He was available to star in Roots, a miniseries adaptation of Alex Haley’s novel about America’s shameful history of slavery, as seen through the eyes of Kunta Kinte and his offspring. LeVar Burton played the young, defiant Kunta in the first two episodes before Amos took over to play the older version, who appears to be more resigned to his imprisonment, even as he keeps plotting an escape and a way to return to Africa. The book had been a phenomenon, and the TV version even more so, with more than half the U.S. population watching at least some of it. Amos had once hoped that Good Times would get America talking about past and present issues confronting the Black community; with Roots, he more than got to live that dream.

Few actors would be able to top playing the lead role in a project as massive as Roots, and Amos unsurprisingly wasn’t able to. Like James Earl Jones, who would play Amos’ in-law in both Coming to America and its 2021 sequel Coming 2 America, Amos would spend much of his career in a casting trap: He wasn’t quite viewed as a leading man, but his imposing size and persona also made him tricky to cast in supporting roles, and he was often hired to provide gravitas to other people’s stories. (Though he could be great at that, like as Admiral Fitzwallace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on The West Wing.) He had memorable jobs here and there — he is incredibly funny as Cleo McDowell and credibly traded blows with Bruce Willis as one of the bad guys in Die Hard 2 — but among his few opportunities to be front and center in a project was an unlikely reunion with Norman Lear, nearly 20 years after Lear fired him from Good Times. 704 Hauser was an All in the Family spin-off of sorts, with Amos playing a blue-collar man living in Archie bunker’s old house in Queens, and with the original show’s core dynamic flipped: Amos was an outspoken liberal, and his son was a conservative (with a white wife played by a young Maura Tierney). Only six episodes were made, though, one of which never aired.  

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In a way, Amos broke into acting at the perfect moment. Television in the Seventies was finally willing, and at times genuinely eager, to tell Black stories after the medium had tried to ignore them for most of its existence. Good Times felt like the right show at the right time, even if it somehow got away from Amos. Roots is probably the most important television show ever made, and among the best. He was at the heart of both. In other ways, Amos was ahead of his time, spending most of his career in an industry that still didn’t know quite what to do with a Black actor with a deep voice and a football player’s physique.

But still, how many actors get one role as immortal as James Evans or Kunta Kinte, let alone two, and prove perfectly suited to the material?