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CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
29
Mixed:
12
Negative:
1
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Critic Reviews
Mar 4, 2022
Aug 3, 2023
Season 2 Review:
Overall, Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty returns with a solid and, in some ways, even more captivating follow-up that comprehensively sums up a large chunk of basketball history. And in a TV landscape where the amount of sports dramas and documentaries is ever-growing, that’s an impressive accomplishment.
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Mar 7, 2022
Season 1 Review:
It bites off more than it can chew by taking on too many characters. We follow more than a dozen characters through a flurry of flashbacks and strange psychological detours, explaining how this parade of damaged men came to be so damaged. (It’s ten episodes, but it could’ve easily be six, or even four.) Its dynamic style and the intriguing personalities involved help it rise above all of that, though.
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The IndependentMar 29, 2022
Mar 4, 2022
Season 1 Review:
Perhaps what is most notable and welcome about “Winning Time” is its sheer sense of fun. ... While too many dramas today take viewers for granted with self-indulgent, drawn-out storytelling, through its first four episodes, “Winning Time” smartly builds each episode to a cliffhanger crescendo that, even with full, one-hour running times, leaves viewers wanting more.
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Feb 28, 2022
Season 1 Review:
Its breakneck pace and flashy mix of genre-bending elements combine to craft a series that’s difficult to look away from and impossible to ignore. HBO’s latest Sunday night offering isn’t so much of a layup as it is a slam dunk, delivering a fun, glitzy origin story of an iconic NBA dynasty.
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Mar 7, 2022
Season 1 Review:
The team doesn’t even play their first game until midway through the 10-episode season, and like so many other shows, there’s some drop-off in momentum after the first few episodes. But this collection of egos is never not interesting, forever colliding in ways fascinating and strange, comedic and fraught. Game on.
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Mar 3, 2022
Season 1 Review:
“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. It is also a foul-mouthed and sex-fueled titanic clash between alpha male super-egos (and some alpha females as well).
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Mar 3, 2022
Season 1 Review:
For all the off-the-court shenanigans, “Winning Time” is primarily about the basketball, and the writers display a keen knowledge of the game whenever McKinney, West, Westhead, Riley, et al., are strategizing. As for practice and game sequences, the actors are convincing enough, with considerable assists from camera angles that make them appear NBA-sized and slick editing that no doubt compensated for shortcomings.
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Feb 28, 2022
Season 1 Review:
There’s not enough depth there to transform the series into more than a rich snapshot of Los Angeles and the sporting world at a particular moment. Bigger issues are examined through some of the characters, but Kareem’s religious and ideological concerns or Jack McKinney’s obsession with the game’s mathematical purity, for example, take Winning Time only to the point of being an entertaining, if familiar depiction of complicated masculine genius.
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The PlaylistJul 31, 2023
Aug 4, 2023
Season 2 Review:
Mostly, “Winning Time” reminds us that big stars often possess even bigger egos and fragile, easily wounded feelings. Yet the many good things about the series – from the performances to the basketball sequences, which feel as if they too have upped their game – would be so much better if the producers just dialed down the snark and salaciousness a few notches.
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RogerEbert.comAug 4, 2023
Season 2 Review:
This season does a slightly better job of capturing the era's spirit, particularly a man-on-street sequence commenting on the Lakers’ losing streak and the ostentatious party atmosphere of the Forum Club. But other than a passing reference to Reagan, connected to Buss’ strategy of taking on more debt for greater growth, "Winning Time" still avoids conversing with the world around it.
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The TimesMar 29, 2022
Season 1 Review:
It was not at all what I expected, which was a stats and sport-heavy “groin strain” of a drama from which I would frequently zone out like I do whenever someone mentions golf. It was the opposite: flash, brash, blowsy, cheesy, bosomy (literally), vulgar, “fun” — and extremely pleased with itself, the drama equivalent of a loud, busty barmaid in a seaside postcard.
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The GuardianMar 29, 2022
The TelegraphMar 29, 2022
Season 1 Review:
If only the show had committed either to OTT comedy – the kind of thing Reilly was born to do – or to serious drama (Rob Morgan, as Johnson’s watchful father, brings a rare dignity to his scenes). But McKay’s attention is on the flashy surface detail rather than the heart of the story.
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Sep 6, 2023
Season 2 Review:
Winning Time is now a glitzy scroll down a Wikipedia page, lobbing important details at the viewer without much care for nuance. .... What’s frustrating about Winning Time is that it doesn’t offer much more than that potted stereotype—something that’s true of almost every character around Johnson and Kareem.
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Mar 8, 2022
Season 1 Review:
The coaching catastrophes offer a compelling throughline to the otherwise limpingly paced season, cohering the massive ensemble and complementing the show’s know-it-all earnestness with its can-you-believe-this raconteurism. ... But for my tastes, McKay has entered, with “Winning Time,” an Aaron Sorkin-esque level of directorial obtrusiveness, where a filmmaker’s tics and indulgences keep calling attention to themselves, distracting from the narrative at hand rather than amplifying it.
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Mar 6, 2022
Season 1 Review:
The equivalent of missing what should be an easy layup, "Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty" stumbles on the road to greatness, undermining can't-miss subject matter for basketball fans with an uneven, at times farcical tone. Although '80s-style excess clearly accounts for much of the sizzle, this exercise feels like a no-look pass that skips out of bounds.
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Aug 7, 2023
Season 2 Review:
Season Two as a whole struggles in many of the same ways that the Showtime-era Lakers did during the years being chronicled, only without any creative highs equivalent to that second title run in 1982. Pat Riley eventually learns to slick back his hair, but the show spotlighting him is even messier than before.
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RogerEbert.comMar 4, 2022
Season 1 Review:
The robust ensemble works so well together, especially Brody and Clarke, they almost pull together the snooze-inducing episodes into something watchable. But the series relies on too many surface-level observations on sexism, racism, regret, and Magic’s promiscuity, and wastes these boundless performances.
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Mar 3, 2022
Season 1 Review:
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. 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.
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The Daily BeastMar 7, 2022
Season 1 Review:
So awful is Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty that this is the conclusion of my review, and I’ve barely mentioned that its gameplay action is monotonous and phony (it’s all alley-oops and fancy passes), its inter-squad squabbling is pedestrian, and its season-long narrative is distended to such a laughable degree that, after eight episodes, it finishes without even getting to the 1980 NBA Playoffs!
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