Brandon Stoddard, a television executive at ABC who shepherded the production of multipart dramas like “Roots” and “The Winds of War” that helped popularize the mini-series, died on Monday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 77.
The cause was cancer, his sister Cecily Stoddard Stranahan said.
By far the most celebrated and influential of Mr. Stoddard’s mini-series was “Roots,” based on Alex Haley’s novel tracing a black American family from Africa through slavery in America through liberation after the Civil War. It was broadcast over eight consecutive nights in 1977.
“The problem with ‘Roots’ was there had never been on television a successful black drama,” Mr. Stoddard recalled in a 2007 interview for the Archive of American Television. “We were scared no one would come to the party.”
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