HBO’s “Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty” wants to be the “Boogie Nights” of basketball, and more often than not achieves the excitement of that pitch. It tells you the history you didn’t know you wanted to know about how the Los Angeles Lakers became such a dominant team, without demanding you know the sport. There are numerous intriguing pieces here in this ten-episode series from Max Borenstein and Jim Hecht, adapted from the book “Showtime” by Jeff Pearlman, including the rise of young rookie Earvin “Magic” Johnson, the million-dollar gambles of unlikely team owner Dr. Jerry Buss, and the recurring question about who should coach. When it’s at its best, “Winning Time” achieves a true groove, made possible by focusing on the most interesting drama this uniquely realized project could offer. But the way in which it handles some of these different elements, even with such a great ensemble, can also slow it down episode by episode.
READ MORE: The 70 Most Anticipated TV Shows & Mini-Series Of 2022
“Winning Time” tips off with an excellent pilot from director Adam McKay, who helps establish the expansive scope but also the fixating visual style that already makes the HBO series so memorable. The series can be just as fast-paced as McKay’s recent films, but instead of the calamitous editing of “Don’t Look Up,” it’s more about splicing in different visual styles—the series actualizes its period with a rich, grainy film look, and then sometimes cuts into close-ups that look ripped from the first color TVs. It’s this type of presentation that goes a long way to keeping the show visually funky, even when its narrative drags. “Winning Time” makes you hungry for its rich world-building, throwing you to a different time not just with the constant bellbottoms, high-platform shoes, and era-appropriate needle drops.
Adding to that charm is the series’ frontman, John C. Reilly, a great McKay collaborator who gives one of his most charismatic performances here as Dr. Jerry Buss. Buss enters into this 1979-1980 story with a wild combover and even crazier dream, of owning the struggling Los Angeles Lakers and turning them into a profitable business. In a saga of eccentrics, he’s the most electric, often seen trying to negotiate an impossible deal with someone in a suit, topping it all off with his own sleazy currency of food, booze, and sex. Reilly is also a formidable guide too in normalizing how the series breaks the fourth-wall for people to make asides or shoot goofy looks—“Winning Time” does this impulsively, and it always keeps the show light.
There are many other pieces that need to come into focus before the first game of the 1979 season. For example, there’s the business with venue The Forum, which Dr. Buss rehauls with the help of Gabbie Hoffmann’s underused character, Claire Rothman. She runs bookings at the place, and employs Buss’ daughter Jeanie (Hadley Robinson); this focus illuminates how a struggling franchise comes down to daily work, and it’s fascinating. In their own ways, everyone is tasked with making sure this revitalization of the team doesn’t flop and put Dr. Buss in even more financial trouble—something his accountant, his mother (played by Sally Field, a standout in her brief scenes) is losing more control of.
Within the show’s interest of inner-workings, like how to run a franchise, how to keep a stadium in business, and how to assemble a team, “Winning Time” displays a keen focus on the pathos of its figureheads. We see that most in Jason Clarke’s portrayal of Jerry West, an NBA champion with a great deal of sadness and anger that causes him to smash his MVP trophy, only to glue it up again later. That same attention is given to Jason Segel’s particularly frail performance as Shakespeare-quoting assistant coach Paul Westhead, and to Adrien Brody as Pat Riley, a former player now trying to find purpose in broadcasting for the Lakers. In a series that is full of good performers investing themselves in the minute power moves, Tracy Letts is also commanding as coach Jack McKinney.
One of the show’s bigger hooks is that it tells the R-rated true story of Magic Johnson (played perfectly by Quincy Isaiah), contrasting his constantly happy demeanor with a sexual appetite and youthful naïveté. In “Winning Time,” it’s a tale of a rookie from Michigan turning himself into a business, becoming a celebrity, and the different connections from his past life that either influence or lose their priority in his life. Rob Morgan is only in the series briefly as Earvin Johnson Sr. but helps ground the many moments that are about Magic’s initial, pure love of the game. However, “Winning Time” drags out a lot of Magic’s arc and struggles to make it interesting aside from presenting it, from showing us when he signed an ill-fated Converse deal, etc. The general pacing for this thread is made all the worse by how we are first introduced to Johnson, in 1991 during a somber moment we assume is his HIV diagnosis. As a story meant to show how he got to that moment, it feels too slow.
It turns out with “Winning Time” that the off-the-court, preseason action is a stronger way to champion the series’ overall fixation with underdogs; it loses some of its edge in later episodes after the stakes are set regarding how revenue from winning a bunch of games and a championship will save Buss’ ass. And for all of its focus on a team of mostly Black players, the show is very good at sitting with sad, angry, white men—perhaps too good. Yes, this interest gives us a Jack Nicholson-like Jason Clarke performance, along with its scenes of Jason Segel, Adrien Brody, and Tracy Letts working out a drama of pride. But the show’s promise of giving us insight into a formative basketball franchise is benched for these meditations on white men being sensitive. These moments aren’t really even about strategy, so much as the emotions that threaten to destroy loyalty. We watch them and think things like, why aren’t we spending more time with players like superstar Kareem Abdul Jabbar (played here by Solomon Hughes)?
It’s in these later passages that parts of “Winning Time” feel like a missed opportunity, especially considering the numerous elements that it gets right overall. History should more or less pop off the screen like it does here, with the style to keep it fresh and insightful. Like its best episodes prove, a series like “Winning Time” is all the more victorious when it gets us to see the game in a totally different way. [B]
“Winning Time” debuts on HBO on March 6.