“How could so many talented people go so horribly wrong?” Kareem Abdul-Jabbar slams HBO drama series Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty in a new blog post. The basketball icon goes on to call the series “deliberately dishonest” and “dreamingly boring.” The show, which is executive produced by Adam McKay, chronicles the Showtime era of the Los Angeles Lakers in the 1980s and stars Solomon Hughes as the younger Abdul-Jabbar.
Abdul-Jabbar begins his blog post by clarifying that his critical reaction to “Winning Time” has nothing to do with how Hughes portrays him on the show. Instead, he writes that the show “commits the sin” of being boring “over and over again.” Abdul-Jabbar also tapped McKay, whose work he used to admire.
“I thought the poor quality of ‘Don’t Look Up’ was an anomaly,” writes Abdul-Jabbar. “I hoped that perhaps because he was overcome by his passion for global warming, his involvement would overshadow his critical eye. But now that ‘Winning Time’ suffers from the same superficiality and lazy writing, I’m not so sure.”
Abdul-Jabbar criticizes “Winning Time” for “boring characterization” and adds: “The characters are clumsy stick-man representations that resemble real people in the way Lego Han Solo resembles Harrison Ford. Each character is reduced to a single distinctive feature, as if the writers feared something more complex would test the viewer’s understanding.”
Jason Clarke plays Lakers head coach Jerry West in Winning Time. Abdul-Jabbar had a close relationship with the real west and said “it’s a shame the way they’re treating him” on the HBO series.
“[Jerry] has been open about his struggle with mental health, particularly depression,” writes Abdul-Jabbar. “Rather than examining his problems with compassion in order to better understand the man, they turn him into a Wile E. Coyote cartoon to poke fun at. He never broke golf clubs, he never threw his trophy through the window. Sure, these actions make for dramatic moments, but they smack more of frivolous exploitation of the man than character exploration.”
Abdul-Jabbar ended his blog post by encouraging readers to look at other projects that better explore the Lakers dynasty. One of these is Magic Johnson’s new Apple TV+ documentary, They Call Me Magic, while another is an upcoming 10-episode documentary series about the Lakers that premieres on Hulu.
Read Abdul-Jabbar’s full blog post on Winning Time on his website.
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