'Winning Time' is Totally Over the Top. Just Like It Should Be.
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What? Did you expect that the show about Showtime wouldn't be a show?
The wildly anticipated series about 1980s-era Los Angeles Lakers—Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty—debuted this Sunday night on HBO. And if you expected that the series, as a Home Box Office Original Series™ would, I don't know, drone to the bleary hum of True Detective or favor the grumpy-faced backstabbing of Game of Thrones, then you were surely disappointed. Winning Time, which stars the likes of John C. Reilly as the late Lakers czar Jerry Buss, and Jason Clarke as a wound-extremely-tight Jerry West, adds a little Adam McKay (who produces the series) flair to the historical record.
Meaning? We see Quincy Isaiah-as-Magic Johnson beaming as he breaks the fourth wall. Jerry West fucking and shitting and goddamning everyone he crosses. You can't forget, of course, Jerry Buss waltzing around like Hugh Hefner's long-lost brother. Various graphics and sidebars pop up like whack-a-mole on the screen, just like we're back in the '80s, watching a cheesy informercial. Clearly, we're not supposed to assume that the true story behind it all, which saw Magic Johnson win five championships with the franchise, actually looked like what we saw on Sunday night: a jockified version of Succession.
That's exactly how it should be.
Not everyone's a fan of the joke, though—especially the people who actually suited up for the Lakers back then. When asked about the show, Magic Johnson said he's "not looking 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 Buss, the current Los Angeles Lakers owner and daughter of Jerry.) As for critics, the series has received a largely positive response, though the over the top showmanship seems to have struck a nerve. IndieWire wrote that Winning Time "can be garish and grating," while Slate added that the show is "so captivated with its own style that it misapprehends what made its subject exciting in the first place."
Imagine a series about the '80s Lakers that played it straight. We'd see Armani embodied, Pat Riley, muttering and looking stern-faced from the sidelines. Jerry West would've just been a short-tempered boardroom presence. Maybe we'd never get the hilarious recreation of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's Airplane! scene, which Winning Time dutifully offers up. Would Magic even smile? That series would be equivalent to the glow-down we saw in Peacock's Bel-Air, which was so desperate to be capital-P Prestige that it sucked the fun and heart out of what Will Smith and co. accomplished in the first Fresh Prince outing. Here, we see how it must have felt to suit up in purple and gold at the time, even if what we actually see doesn't look a whole heck of a lot like the real-life history.
The Lakers we meet in Winning Time were dubbed Showtime for a reason—Johnson, Buss, Riley, and the rest—infused basketball with the style, verve, and plain fun that laid the red carpet for the NBA as we know it today, where sport and culture are synonymous with each other. McKay and the team behind the production are right to drive over the speed limit in their recreation. The arena had a damn nightclub in it, for god's sake.
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