Last week, basketball legend Jerry “The Logo” West threatened HBO’s Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty series with legal action over his portrayal in the Adam McKay-produced dramedy. The story was met with widespread confusion, for two reasons: 1) as HBO has since stated, Winning Time is not a documentary, and 2) given its extremely weak ratings, most people didn’t even know what all the dramatic headlines were about.
Despite a star-studded cast (including Jason Segel, John C. Reilly, Gaby Hoffman, Sally Fields, and Adrien Brody, among many others) and a lot of promotional fanfare, Winning Time hasn’t been able to pick up on the post-The Last Dance wave of NBA nostalgia and establish itself as one of the most exciting new series of 2022 – even after a post-newscycle spike in viewership, Winning Time’s eighth episode only drew 410,000 viewers. It’s not for lack of trying, either: in its attempts to be both exciting and relevant, Winning Time is a series trying to be a lot of things at the same time – and as a result, is a disparate set of mostly disappointing parts, highlighted by the occasional moment of clarity catalyzed by the show’s strong central performances.
Adapted from Jeff Pearlman’s award-winning novel about the rise and fall of the 1980’s Showtime Lakers dynasty, Winning Time is an amalgamation of Adam McKay-isms, the kind of annoying, superficial nonsense highlighted in his most recent films, the dreadful pairing of Vice and Don’t Look Up!. There’s stylistic dissonance (shots vacillate between being shot in crisp high-definition, to jump cuts using dramatic, overwrought filters to mimic film quality of the time period its imitating), characters constantly looking at the camera to explain everything, and a maddening desperation to be relevant – which culminates in awkward moments like when Winning Time posits a baby Kobe Bryant might’ve been in the audience for one of Magic Johnson’s first games (a moment as groan-worthy as it sounds).
To its credit, the godawful McKay-directed pilot is followed up with a few strong entries; early on, the show is able to rely on Quincy Isaiah’s magnetic performance as young Magic to vault over some of its more painful attempts at storytelling. But through the first season, Winning Time rarely affords any character, let alone Magic, room to operate as anything other than a placeholder for more interesting, nuanced portrayals of its mythical central figures (like the brief first appearance of Larry Bird, whose character is just “pimply dude who spits tobacco” and nothing else).
On Garbage Minutes, the unofficial Winning Time podcast (available in The Mid-Season Replacements podcast feed – shameless plug complete!) I’ve described Winning Time as Adderall: The Series. For every powerful moment – like when the series is examining the generational political gap between Magic and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, teammate and established star of the league – Winning Time offers a half-dozen unnecessary asides and indulgent tangents, which range in effectiveness from pointless to pandering. Instead of using its smaller stories and navel-gazing as accents to its more powerful moments, Winning Time employs the reverse, which leads to a show drowning its best moments in thundering mediocrity.
It’s also clear this series has absolutely no clue how to write the women of the Showtime Lakers story; though the series is capable of defining a character like Red Auerbach (Michael Chiklis, absolutely hamming it up) in but five minutes of screen time, we’ve had two months of Winning Time flailing (and failing) to build stories around Jeanie Buss (Hadley Robinson), Claire Rothman (Gaby Hoffman), and Jessi Buss (Sally Field, in a role that will you have you asking “why is she here?”).
But Winning Time’s worst crimes are not its one-dimensional characters, underwhelming stories, and maddening stylistic gyrations – in the rare, rare moments that Winning Time thinks, talks, or displays the game of basketball, it is embarrassingly bad (anyone want to watch a seven-minute sequence of basketball featuring over 260 individual cuts? Didn’t think so). When it comes to building conflict around the Lakers attempts to reinvent themselves – and modern basketball offenses in the process – is when Winning Time is at its absolute worst, a sin that is borderline unforgivable (clearly, none of these writers have watched season two of One Tree Hill).
It all adds up for one of the most disappointing, unappealing dramatic propositions in recent memory, something that even the most hardcore basketball fans and historical nerds (raises hand) will struggle to find joy in. Sure, Brody is fun as Pat Riley having a mid-life crisis, and Clarke’s West brings some much-needed bravado (and vulgarity), but those nascent highlights are not worth the spastic, paranoid series comprimising the other 90% of its running time.
With a stunning lack of punchlines and basketball, Winning Time just feels like a vanity project gone wrong, a series convinced of its importance and relevance with a blind confidence that borders on arrogance. There are frustrating television series, and then there’s Winning Time, which desperately needs a creative reset before its recently-announced second season commences.