Which? Did you expect a show about Showtime to not be a show?
The highly anticipated 1980s Los Angeles Lakers series, Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty, debuted this Sunday night on HBO. And if you were expecting the show as a Home Box Office Original Series™ to, I don’t know, buzz to the murky hum of True Detective or favor the vicious betrayal of Game of Thrones, then you must have been disappointed. Winning Time, which stars John C. Reilly as the late Lakers czar Jerry Buss and Jason Clarke as the extraordinarily taut Jerry West, adds a touch of Adam McKay’s (who produces the series) flair to the historical record.
I mean? We see Quincy Isaiah-as-Magic Johnson shine as he breaks the fourth wall. Jerry West fucked, crap and cursed everyone he crossed paths with. You certainly can’t forget that Jerry Bass waltzes like Hugh Hefner’s long-lost brother. Various graphics and sidebars pop up on the screen like “hit the mole” like we’re back in the 80s and watching a crappy commercial. Clearly, we shouldn’t assume that the true story behind all of this, in which Magic Johnson won five championships with the franchise, actually looked like what we saw on Sunday night: a beefy version of The Legacy.
That’s exactly how it should be.
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However, not all fans of this joke, especially people who really played for the Lakers then. When asked about the show, Magic Johnson said he “doesn’t look forward to it”. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar added, “The story of the Showtime Lakers is best told by those who actually lived through it.” (No comment yet from Jeanie Bass, current owner of the Los Angeles Lakers and daughter of Jerry.) IndieWire wrote that Winning Time “can be flashy and irritating” while Slate added that the show “is so caught up in its own style that it misunderstands what made its subject matter exciting in the first place.”
Imagine an 1980s Lakers TV show where everything was fair. We would have seen the incarnation of Armani, Pat Riley, mumbling and looking sternly from the side. Jerry West would have been just a short-tempered boardroom attendant. Maybe we’ll never get Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s hilarious recreation of the plane! scene that Winning Time dutifully offers. Will Magic smile? This series would be equivalent to the fading we saw in Peacock’s Bel Air, which was so desperate to be prestigious with a capital P that it sucked the fun and soul out of what Will Smith and co. achieved in the first release of Fresh Prince. Here we see what it was like to dress in purple and gold at the time, even if what we’re actually seeing doesn’t sound like the real story.
The Lakers we meet in Win Time didn’t just call it Showtime – Johnson, Buss, Riley and the rest – brought to basketball the style, excitement and simple fun that rolled out the red carpet for the NBA that we are. we know it today, where sport and culture are synonymous with each other. McKay and the team behind production are right about speeding their game. For God’s sake, there was a goddamn nightclub in the arena.
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