HBO's Winning Time is clearly the work of people who know & love basketball history

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https://www.avclub.com/winning-time-...hbo-1848608019

"They love shooting in the sweaty practice gyms and the labyrinthine corridors beneath The Forum," says Noel Murray of the HBO limited series executive produced by Adam McKay, from showrunners Rodney Barnes and Max Borenstein. He adds: "The writing team has their pet themes. They explore how nearly every one of their characters is driven by a broken relationships with their parents. Winning Time frequently introduces flashbacks, to show how West’s tough childhood in West Virginia, or how the activist Abdul-Jabbar feuded with his New York transit cop father. The show also digs into the subtle (and not-so-subtle) racism underlying the league’s promotion of the Magic/Bird rivalry, and the coded words NBA execs used to describe white players and black players. On the whole though, Winning Time isn’t heavy or preachy. It mostly shifts between affectionate, wonky, and playfully ironic. This is a portrait of an NBA on the precipice of a major transformation, thanks to new stars and new corporate partners (including Nike, whose failed shoe pitch to Magic is a plot line in one episode). It’s a show about how creating something great and lasting is hard work, and how not everyone involved emerges unbruised. Winning Time is about one of sport’s golden ages, yes; but it’s also about the nebulousness of that very concept. By including a lot of different perspectives, the Winning Time team makes clear that in hindsight, everyone has a different idea about what a golden age was really like—and about when and why it ended."

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• Winning Time's sensibility screams “self-indulgent show-off" -- until you get used to it: Winning Time, says Jen Chaney, "is about as subtle as leaping over two big men to deliver a decisive slam dunk in an NBA playoff game. It’s showy and a little arrogant, brash and aggressive, urgent and quickly paced when the moment calls for it. It can be a little much until you get used to it, and even then, it’s still a little much. But once you get hooked into the story of how a struggling team reinvented itself and the NBA experience, you may find it hard to look away, even though its pleasures run more surface level than deep." Chaney adds: "Throughout Winning Time, there are deliberately jumpy edits, bits of documentary-style imagery, flashes of actual footage from the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, brief experiments with animation, and occasional splashes of text that appear on screen. In one scene, when Lakers coach Jack McKinney (a rigidly focused Tracy Letts) tries to sketch out a play that operates according to his constant-motion offense, the arrows leap off the page and swirl around McKinney’s body as he levitates just above his chair. This is a show that can’t sit still for even a second, one that at times appears to have done a line of cocaine right before the opening credits. The visual patina, which is just as conspicuous as these other techniques, might best be described as Late-’70s Sepia Haze. It is purposely grainy as a nod to its era and washed out frequently by the blinding L.A. sun. Even if you watch Winning Time in HD, it will still look like an old glitchy videotape or a 1980 broadcast coming through with cloudy reception on a TV with rabbit ears."
• Winning Time is like a scripted approach to The Last Dance: "I do think this show is a winner — even though it showboats with its tone and approach, and goes out of its way to be out of the ordinary," says David Bianculli. "Think of the extraordinary appeal and success of ESPN's The Last Dance back in 2020. That series found as much drama off the court as on as it told of the rise of a later basketball dynasty — Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls, who ruled the sport in the 1990s. The Last Dance dived into the backstories of the individual players, arguments among the coaches and owners, and lots of side stories about racism, sex and sexist attitudes — not to mention the growing commercialization of sports endorsements. The series covered all that, dynamically – but as a documentary. Winning Time takes the based-on-fact dramatic approach, hiring actors to play the familiar roles, and taking dramatic license with certain events. In fact, Winning Time takes a lot of license, in a lot of ways."
• Winning Time is defined by the increasingly wearying style of Adam McKay: "As in his feature films like The Big Short and Vice, the fourth wall is broken so often that it’s less wall than revolving door; what’s revealed to us is usually either banal (the idea that the act of love is like a sport because both have rhythm) or a data-dump that would be better revealed in another way," says Daniel D'Addario. "The soupcon of prurience poured over the top feels — in a way HBO programming rarely does these days — like an attention-getting stand-in for good ideas. Give the show this much: It’s trying to summon the spirit of the times it depicts."
• Like the Showtime Lakers, Winning Time is a hell of a lot of fun to watch: "In some ways, Winning Time feels doubly nostalgic, both for the boys-will-be-boys heyday of men like Magic Johnson and new Lakers owner Jerry Buss (John C. Reilly, in a Talladega Nights/Step Brothers reunion with McKay), and for the premium-cable era that so easily glamorized antiheroic men making bad choices around womanizing, substance abuse, and other sketchy behaviors," says Alan Sepinwall. He adds that many of the "choices are out of the filmmaking toolbox McKay has been dipping into dating back to The Big Short. They can be a lot to sift through in one show, and the style can periodically get in the way of the substance. The changing image quality, for instance, seems to happen without rhyme or reason, often in the middle of scenes, in ways that distract from whatever is happening. The direct addresses to camera tend to work well, though, frequently injecting levity into otherwise serious situations without weakening the drama. But the show is often at its most effective when it dials back the excesses even slightly, like a delicately edited (but still explicit) sex scene between Magic and his girlfriend Cindy (Rachel Hilson) in a later episode."
• To Winning Time‘s credit, it actually manages to capture the joy and exhilaration of watching those great Showtime Lakers teams: "Yes, it’s significantly overstuffed and surprisingly crude, and I do wonder if non-sports fans will get into it, but for me, it’s a hell of a fun ride," says Dave Nemetz, a fan of the Lakers since the Showtime era. "(A lot more fun than watching the current Lakers season, I can tell you that.)" He adds: "Winning Time feels like a freewheeling party from that era: breezily paced, with lots of laughs and characters breaking the fourth wall to directly address the camera. (Adam McKay is an executive producer and directs the pilot, and the show’s style recalls his financial crisis explainer The Big Short.) The tone is decidedly old-fashioned, too, with gratuitous nudity and off-color humor that’s straight from the swinging ’70s. The visuals follow suit, with grainy 16-millimeter footage spliced into scenes alongside crisp HD images to create a vintage vibe. Plus, the funk soundtrack practically struts, with dramatic scenes scored by a moody synthesizer."
• While Winning Time disappoints, Quincy Isaiah delivers a revelatory performance as Magic Johnson: Isaiah's "wide-open approach, totally in control, invites us to consider just what makes this budding legend tick," says Gregory Lawrence. "Isaiah is adept at portraying Johnson’s earnest, endearing side, while also making him a figure of constant calculation, able to turn his charisma into a devastating weapon as needed. Heck, he even pulls off the camera asides and other stylistic difficulties that McKay’s production demands. It’s a star-making performance in the middle of an asteroid belt. But he’s saddled with choppy filmmaking and some one-note, loud, shallow writing (shepherded by series creators Max Borenstein and Jim Hecht), that robs the narrative of texture and substitutes shallow pop psychology for illuminating humanity. The Showtime Era of Lakers basketball was some of the most entertaining television you could watch. Winning Time is mostly hitting bricks."
• Winning Time is garish and grating, but it is entertaining: "Beyond its considered analysis of what’s lost within an all-consuming drive to win, Winning Time is a lot of flash: big names, brazen storytelling, and near-constant nostalgia bait," says Ben Travers. "The premiere, directed by Adam McKay, sees the director at his most excessive and least focused — bouncing between frame-filling close-ups of ’80s-era paraphernalia to fourth-wall breaking narration from a half-dozen characters. But for sports fans (especially Lakers devotees), the 10-episode first season’s unapologetically biased depiction of building a dynasty through near-catastrophic obsession should carry weight. For everyone else, it still puts on a show."
• It’s a bizarre comparison, but Winning Time is a bit like The Martian or Zodiac, for basketball: "The eight episodes sent to critics contrast the briskness of the on-court action with a chronological deliberation that will be nirvana to the immediately engaged and glacial to those whose interest begins and ends with Magic’s no-look passes and Kareem’s sky-hook," says Daniel Fienberg. "It is, for want of a better word, a basketball procedural: Each episode introduces a series of on- and off-court issues and, albeit with some collapsing of the timeline and minor futzing of details, delves into the real-life solutions, sometimes accentuated by flashbacks focusing on a single player or coach. It’s a bizarre comparison, but Winning Time is a bit like The Martian or Zodiac, for basketball." He adds: "The question, one I can’t immediately answer, is what crossover appeal Winning Time is going to have; while HBO has specialized in dramas about insulated enclaves of fame and wealth, this series is significantly more focused on basketball than Succession is on the media or The Gilded Age is on 19th-century robber barons. Winning Time is able to explain, for example, why it was interesting and even notable that the Lakers had to settle for Jack McKinney (an appropriately erudite Tracy Letts) and his nerdy approach to offense after Jerry Tarkanian (the wonderfully reptilian Rory Cochrane) turned down the coaching gig. But explaining and making uninterested viewers care are two very different things, though nobody will accuse this series of lacking evident effort."
• What’s remarkable about Winning Time is the attention to detail: "This stunning visual achievement seamlessly blends original material with archival footage," says Michael Grant. "So much so that there are moments when it’s difficult to differentiate between what is newly filmed and what is old. The series itself is meant to look like the 1980s and succeeds. From the clothing and hairstyles to little things like Gatorade bottles in the locker room, Coors beer cans in the coaching offices, and vintage corporate signage at The Forum. The casting is also a triumph. Everyone fits with few exceptions. You can credibly believe John C. Reilly as Jerry Buss, an obsessed let-the-good-times-roll extrovert with a voracious appetite for basketball and sex. Reilly does very good work here, although we will always wonder how Will Ferrell would have handled the role. Ferrell is a vastly underrated dramatic actor."
• John C. Reilly is the reason Winning Time works so well: Reilly combines "root-for-him warmth with hedonistic disco-era id," says Taylor Antrim. "He is introduced in the first episode, in 1979 Los Angeles, in flagrante in a waterbed at the Playboy Mansion, breaking the fourth wall and comparing basketball to sex. Reilly goes all out as the hard-spending, hard-partying Buss, who bought the Lakers and transformed the team into a cultural phenomenon. His silk shirts opened to the belly, tinted shades firmly in place, Reilly dispenses with all restraint because Winning Time is that kind of show: impolite, shamelessly unsubtle, highly entertaining."
• Winning Time is freewheeling and creative: "Through the first eight episodes provided to critics, Winning Time is like those vintage Lakers on a fast break: quick-moving, freewheeling, creative, packed with colorful characters and occasionally rising to the level of art," says G. Allen Johnson. "It is also a foul-mouthed and sex-fueled titanic clash between alpha male super-egos (and some alpha females as well)." He adds: "The constant swirl of dramatic action, bigger-than-life characters and obsessive drive make Winning Time impossible to resist."
• Winning Time is further proof that TV is the best medium at telling sports stories: "Its long-term approach to storytelling means it's better equipped to chronicle and interrogate the visceral highs and lows of a team or athlete, whether it's over a single season or across years," says Kaitlin Thomas. "The episodic structure creates space to investigate the personal lives, individual triumphs, and devastating setbacks of players, coaches, managers, and others connected to a particular sport, and it's made for some captivating art over the years. From the small-town community at the heart of Friday Night Lights and the bloody fights of Kingdom to the brotherhood of One Tree Hill and a disgraced announcer on Brockmire, we've been blessed with unique takes on the wide world of sports for the last 20 years. And with more recent additions like Ted Lasso, Dare Me, The Mighty Ducks: Game Changers, All American, and Heels, we've been able to explore the inner workings and team dynamics of soccer, cheerleading, hockey, football, and wrestling, all in satisfying fashion. Now you can add basketball to the mix (again) with the debut of HBO's Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty."
• Adam McKay and his team should've learned from his other show, Succession: "It’s as if McKay (and Winning Time’s lead writers Rodney Barnes and Max Borenstein by extension) didn’t pick up any story craft from working with Jesse Armstrong on Succession," says Andrew Lawrence. "That show knows how to marshal a large production: cram it in a tight space (a private jet, a kid’s room). Winning Time is all sprawl, dipping back and forth from LA when it isn’t exploring haunts like the Playboy Mansion – an even more haunting stop now in light of recent sexual abuse allegations made in a still-unfurling 10-part A&E docuseries. Really, most of the sex appeal feels cringe, the kind of stuff HBO once spattered across its shows to hook subscribers. (See Jason Clarke, as Lakers coach Jerry West, having sex with his future wife.) Sure, LA was all about free love back then. But that doesn’t mean Winning Time had to be so regressive."
• How Sean Patrick Small went from writing his own Larry Bird story to playing the NBA legend: The producers asked Small how much he knew about Bird. "'It’s funny you should ask,'" says Small, who replaced Bo Burnham. “I’ve actually been doing a project of my own for a long time and I know pretty much everything there is to know about him.”
• Quincy Isaiah dreamed up playing Shaquille O'Neal: “I always thought my dream role was Shaq, but I ended up playing Magic — I was like, ‘This might be a better role!’" he says.
• How "unknowns" Quincy Isaiah and Solomon Hughes transformed into, respectively, Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: Isaiah has had a few minor acting roles, while Winning Time marks Hughes' acting debut. “It’s tough, I’m not going to lie,” says Isaiah. “You’re playing someone who is beloved, a hero. It’s tough to see that the people you look up to are human. But it’s also helpful. It shows that they’re not that different from you. You can mess up, make mistakes and still come out on top. You don’t do a show like this without a deep admiration and love for what they did and who they are. I just hope the people see that — that these people are human but also extraordinary.” Hughes adds: “There is definitely fear and trepidation in playing these guys. But I don’t take for granted the opportunity to honor these men, to tell their story and show what they built, the coming together of sports and entertainment. These were the two players at the center of making that happen.”
• Solomon Hughes went from college basketball stud two decades ago to earning his Ph.D. to making his acting debut on Winning Time: A casting agency contacted Hughes in 2019. As it turns out, he was a fan since childhood of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. So he prepared for the role with an old teammate. When it came time to audition, he read with Quincy Isaiah, who would end up portraying Magic Johnson. “To use a sports analogy, I just left it all on the floor,” Hughes tells SF Gate. “I just went in there and put it all out there and trusted the process. It was terrifying; it was incredibly fun. You talk about stepping outside your comfort zone — it really, really was one of those out-of-body experiences where I’m like, ‘OK, this is happening, let’s go.’” What was Hughes doing when the Winning Time casting opportunity presented itself? "I had been working at Stanford for about eight years and I was primarily doing administrative stuff," he tells The Athletic. "And I really enjoyed the administrative stuff, but I loved teaching. I had the opportunity to teach in the Graduate School of Education and I’d taught some undergrad courses and I knew ‘All right, Solomon, you want to work in higher education, and you want to do something you’re super passionate about, you want to teach.’ So I left Stanford and my plan was to spend close to a year writing and applying for faculty gigs. Literally within a month after leaving Stanford, an audition came my way. I grew a up a huge fan of film and TV, just the craft of acting. I’m someone whose life has literally been shaped and inspired by performances of great actors."
• Author Jeff Pearlman had "very little" influence on the series: How similar is Winning Time to his book on the Showtime Lakers? “It’s definitely similar," he says. "It’s not a documentary. It’s a dramatic series. For example, in the book, (the Lakers) had a coach when Magic was drafted named Jack McKinney. He coached them for a handful of games and then he had a bicycle accident. Very few people have talked about it. I wrote extensively about it. When I’m watching the show and they’re digging deep into Jack McKinney, it just warms my heart."
• Adam McKay says finding someone to portray Magic Johnson and exude his energy was the toughest part of Winning Time: “It was the single hardest casting challenge I’ve ever encountered, and our casting director, Francine Maisler, would tell you the same thing," he says. "It was crazy, and to this day, I can’t believe Quincy and Dr. Hughes came our way. I mean it’s unbelievable. These guys can play ball, and they’re really talented actors, and they’re thoughtful, and they were collaborators. I’ve never experienced anything like it in all the years I’ve been doing it, and that goes for this whole cast. The whole cast is so unique. I mean DeVaughn (Nixon) is incredible. Tamera (Tomakili), amazing. Across the board, it was so cool to see how this cast just fell in line because the story of the Showtime Lakers involves so many different people and so many different points of view and backgrounds. I mean that’s why we were drawn to it.”

Winning Time is so captivated with its Adam McKay style, it forgets what made the Lakers exciting

"Winning Time showcases many of the most grating tendencies of McKay’s recent work," says Jack Hamilton of the HBO's Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty, which McKay executive produces and directs. "So many different characters break the fourth wall and address the camera, and so frequently, that the show’s narrative coherence is undermined from its opening minutes. The editing is pointlessly flashy, with jump-cuts and split screens interjected into otherwise banal exchanges between characters. Obvious subtexts are rendered as text, sometimes literally in the form of title cards that blare onto the screen. The sum effect is a smug brand of 'comedy' that congratulates you for being in on the joke while not really bothering to make many jokes. Compounding the tonal and storytelling inconsistencies of Winning Time is how the show actually looks. In order to achieve 'period' veracity, the filmmakers alternately employ the visual aesthetics of grainy 8 mm and 16 mm film stock and old-fashioned Betacam tapes. The novelty of this is initially interesting but quickly grows distracting, as there’s no apparent logic to when and why each style is applied. (There are many times when the format changes from one shot to the next within the same scene, an effect so jarring it can feel like a continuity error.)" Hamilton adds: "Winning Time is so captivated with its own style that it misapprehends what made its subject exciting in the first place. There’s a restless, frantic quality to the show that seems to want to pay tribute to the run-and-gun style of the Showtime Lakers themselves, but those teams weren’t great because they were a bunch of devil-may-care loose cannons. They were ridiculously controlled, and their thrilling, up-tempo style was only possible because the players enacting it—starting with Magic Johnson—were preternaturally intelligent and disciplined in execution. Winning Time feels more like watching a bunch of middle schoolers trying to fling no-look passes and ill-fated lobs to each other at recess, the occasional moments of connection overwhelmed by a general atmosphere of chaos."

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• Adam McKay's signature style is spreading...to Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber: The McKay style really goes into overdrive on Winning Time, says Linda Holmes. "That first episode has your fourth-wall breaking, your explanations to the camera, your freeze-frames, your different film stocks, your big captions — it has a ton of this," she says. "A lot of this. So, so much of this. And it continues throughout the series. And again, either this is your thing, or it is not your thing. I was more concerned, however, to see these same tics all over Showtime's series Super Pumped, which is about (former) Uber head Travis Kalanick (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). Adam McKay didn't make Super Pumped, but boy, would you ever think he did....As I said, Adam McKay has a thing that he does, and some people really like it, and it can be funny, and it's certainly stylish. But in excess, it can tip toward the obnoxious, it can flirt with the smug, and particularly if you're talking about a guy like Kalanick, I'm not sure making the whole thing more obnoxious or more smug is really the way to go. I think McKay's influence as someone who tries to dig into unsavory characters and weird moments in history with this kind of detached hard stare will certainly continue — he's on tap to make a movie about Theranos, starring Jennifer Lawrence, for Apple. And in general, I don't think we're anywhere near the end of the boom in television and film about hustlers and scammers and plain old eager operators. But everybody does not have to use the same style, and that style — which can be charming when used to talk about Magic Johnson and NBA defenses, isn't the best or the most palatable way to talk about guys who already seem kinda ... puffed-up."
• Winning Time is America's answer to The Crown: "After all, elite athletes are about as close to royalty as this country gets. Their reigns are even called dynasties," says Alison Herman. "And just as The Crown took several seasons to reach the real heart of its story, Winning Time seems designed to play out over years, not just weeks. Whatever flaws its first episodes may have, the show at least looks like it’ll have time to work them out. The Crown is now headed into its fifth season of a planned six with a whopping 21 Emmys in hand. This outcome wasn’t guaranteed; to reach such rarefied air, Winning Time runs a similar set of risks as the Netflix series did at the start. A common critique of historical dramas holds that they can be about as exciting as a staged reading of a Wikipedia page. That may not seem like an issue with personalities as big, or cocaine habits as raging, as the 1980s NBA. Still, Winning Time has to contend with the same obstacle as any show that recreates real-life events while stretching them out over several episodes. When we already know the outcome of any given conflict, the resulting story gets sapped of tension. In a world as dependent on unknown outcomes as sports, that potential inertia is an existential threat."
• Winning Time had to be over the top: "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," says Brady Langmann, adding: "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."
• Winning Time is a cringeworthy disaster: "As dismal as the Los Angeles Lakers’ current 2021-2022 campaign, Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty is guaranteed to turn the stomachs of not only Boston Celtics fans, but anyone hoping for more than an egregiously cartoonish and ham-fisted hagiography executed with all the subtlety of a no-look pass to the nuts," says Nick Schager. "Corny, superficial and severely full of itself, HBO’s ten-part series wants to be both an unabashed celebration and a complicated study of flawed characters. However, in the hands of creators Max Borenstein and Jim Hecht, and executive producer and director Adam McKay, it plays as a fictionalized fanboy take on a beloved franchise, marked by mounds of obvious exposition, unbearably cringe-worthy aesthetics, and a steady stream of literal winking at the camera that’s then embellished by cutesy 'ding!' sound effects."
• Winning Time is a show about the idea of Los Angeles: "For as much as Winning Time...is about basketball, it's also about the Lakers' version of Los Angeles, the dreamy glittering dream of the city that has lured so many people time and time again," says Esther Zuckerman. "In some ways, the show itself somehow feels like Los Angeles: It can be vast in scope and overwhelming. Sometimes watching it feels like listening to someone who just snorted a huge amount of cocaine. It's occasionally sleazy, and borders, in some moments, on exploitation. If you bail you can't really be faulted. You're just the ingenue who packed her bags and got on a bus back home. If there's an underlying thesis to Winning Time, it's that Jerry Buss, embodied by Reilly as a jovial horndog with a combover, reimagined the Lakers in the image of Los Angeles—flashy and celebrity-obsessed. On screen, introduced walking out of the Playboy Mansion the morning after what was presumably an orgy, pitching his idea for the franchise. He wants basketball to feel like a night at the Mansion. There will be excitement and celebrities and boobs, the latter of which will come in the form of the halftime entertainment, the dancers that would eventually become known as the Laker Girls."
• Winning Time gets the L.A. cocaine era correct: "Shows often try too hard to recreate an iconic era with teeth-gnashing results," says Bill Shea. "This show, so far, is thriving on the celluloid La La Land that is almost its own character. This show is Steely Dan’s 'Glamour Profession' come to life. I also appreciate how Winning Time is making race central to the story and doesn’t seem to gloss over it."
• Winning Time's cinematography tried to evoke a "pop-culture mixtape": “The early conversations were that it would be shot on film because of the time period, and because Adam’s a film guy,” says co-cinematographer Todd Banhazl, who shot Episodes 1, 2, 5, 6, 9, and 10. “And we knew from the scripts that the show was going to be mixing in footage that we had shot, period footage that we had shot, real archival with photos. It was like a pop culture mixtape, pulling in from all these references from our collective memory.”
• Michael Chiklis says Adam McKay offered him his dream role of Red Auerbach after he filmed a cameo for Don't Look Up: “He said, ‘you should go talk to your agent because I just offered you the role of Red Auerbach in the Lakers series I’m doing for HBO.’” Chiklis says. “I looked at him and said, ‘don’t f*** with me.’ He said, ‘I would never f*** with you.’ Sure enough, he made this offer.”
• DeVaughn Nixon says when his dad Norm Nixon found out he was playing him, he said: "Okay, cool. Just don’t make me look stupid": "He’s just gonna step back and let me have my turn," the younger Nixon says of portraying his father on Winning Time. DeVaughn Nixon says producers auditioned him not knowing that he was a veteran actor who appeared on shows ranging from Runaways to Sonny with a Chance to The Secret Life of the American Teenager and NCIS. "Everybody thinks that (the producers) just gave me the role," he says. "They had no idea who I was; they had no idea that I acted. They literally thought I walked off the street, came in and auditioned, and I was my dad’s son and happened to look like him. But I got a callback and then I found out that I got it. And interestingly enough, I beat my brother for it. (Laughs.) My brother has done some stuff, but I was the more seasoned actor, I would say. I couldn’t be more thrilled, man."
• Jason Clarke says Lakers owner Jeanie Buss greeted him and John C. Reilly warmly during a recent game: "She was lovely, just lovely," says Clarke, who plays Jerry West. "She just couldn't have been nicer. I'm not kidding you. We were very touched. It was very moving. It's her father, you know? I don't think we'll see the likes of him again." Clarke says he'd like to meet Jerry West, "but all indications are he is not going to want to watch this or he's not going to be interested in it."

Winning Time's fourth wall-breaking is just too much

It's time to declare a temporary ban on breaking the fourth wall on TV shows and movies, says Kelly Conaboy of Adam McKay's new HBO Showtime Lakers series. "For the time being, if you want the audience to understand something, you will have to find a way to portray it in action and dialogue," says Conaboy, who adds: "It’s a pretty good trick when the person speaking directly to us is Anthony Bourdain, and he’s explaining whatever 'collateralized debt obligation' is. The reason behind that use of fourth-wall breaking, in The Big Short, was clear: this was boring, but necessary, information that had to be relayed in a captivating way. The reason for (Adam) McKay’s trick is less clear, though, when the person speaking directly to us is John C. Reilly, and what he’s explaining is that basketball is 'like great sex' (because there is rhythm involved, and bodies). Ahh … like great sex you say? Well, I might just be interested in this 'basketball' after all! In the first 15 minutes of Winning Time, four main characters break the fourth wall, each multiple times. There are two instances of meta-fourth-wall breaking: characters replying directly to camera to what another character has said directly to camera. There are three instances of informative fourth-wall breaking graphics. The gimmick is immediately tiresome, and it continues, though less frequently, throughout the entire series. It is as if Adam McKay saw Fleabag and thought, 'But what if every element of a TV show were Fleabag talking to the camera?' And 'but what if every element of a TV show were Fleabag talking to the camera?' is a fine thought to have while watching Fleabag, sure, as long as it is followed at some point by the thought, 'It would be very annoying.' Alas, in this case, it was not."

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• Winning Time is so great because it avoids the glorification of and pandering to sports and athletes: "There’s something exciting about how unsentimental it is about this particular era in the NBA’s history and all the principals involved," says Israel Daramola. "Sports entertainment is both booming and stagnant at the moment. The market is currently flooded with documentaries and ten-part docuseries that are really just overlong commercials. There’s a lot of carefully orchestrated, brand-conscious targeted media promising to take you into the game from 'the player’s POV,' which mainly serves the purpose of selling whichever athlete has lent their brand to the project. It’s a savvy method of making sure the official history is glossed over by the select few winners with enough equity to tell it. Magic Johnson himself already has a deal in place with Apple TV+ to do his a big docuseries on the order of Michael Jordan’s The Last Dance from 2020, Kareem has a similar deal with Hulu, and both players have already made splashy documentaries about their legacies that are interesting enough in their own ways, but which exist mostly to buff the shine on all their previous successes. This seems something like the point. It’s not just the nonfiction entries that pander, movies as diverse as Draft Day, Moneyball, and the Academy Award nominated King Richard all essentially serve this same function—easy mythmaking and wholesome Americana, both for players and the sports themselves, with a heavy emphasis on the heroes. The contemporary sports film is an offshoot of the big Hollywood biopic, which is to say a flattened version of history that leans heavy on inspiration and the supposed value of being a 'great' man."
• Winning Time is hard to like when there's so much "outright making things up": "I know, I know: This cinematic adaptation of Jeff Pearlman's bestselling 2014 book Showtime is merely meant to be a dramatization of the Lakers' wildly successful (and just plain wild) 1980s as opposed to a documentary like The Last Dance," says Marc Stein, a longtime NBA journalist for ESPN and The New York Times. "Some of you will inevitably say: Lighten up, Stein. I'm sorry, friends, but even such disclaimers have limits when it comes to the dramatization of real-life events involving one of the most culturally significant and well-chronicled teams in the history of modern sport. I want to love this show so much. We're only one episode into what proper TV critics who have seen so much more of the series say is a slow-moving arc, so there is apparently still plenty of time to get there. I intend to watch every single second of every single episode we get, whether or not the series gets any more accurate from here, but too much of Episode 1 wasn't even in the proverbial ballpark for accuracy. For this viewer and presumably many others eager to relive such glorious days, that's a problem. Sensationalized sex and drugs and party scenes were to be expected. This is HBO. Yet when it comes to the sports stuff, especially when we're talking about a period of Lakers history filled with no shortage of actual documented outrageousness for the show's brain trust to draw from, outright making things up because of the supposed need to create dramatic tension comes at a credibility loss that, for certain segments of the audience, will be hard to shake."
• Winning Time's year-long pandemic delay allowed producers to rethink it as a Game of Thrones-style saga: “It gave us a year in which to really dig deeper, to rethink how we were approaching it, to slow the role,” says co-creator Max Borenstein. “And rather than playing it as something that was gonna finish a whole decade in two seasons, we realized: No, this is a continuing saga. This is every bit as rich, material-wise, as the books from Game of Thrones. It’s world-building in the same way. And we thought we could tell a real American epic.”