Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty

While Winning Time hasn’t invented the sports docudrama, I can’t see a future in which it doesn’t set a visual standard by which all sports docudramas (at least in the near term) will be compared.

“Winning Time” is an Adam McKay (“Don’t Look Up,” “The Big Short,” “Anchorman”) production and it’s a rowdy mix of quick cuts, famous names, salty scenes and frenetic energy. The casting is just delicious. ... This one’s got a lot of bounce in it. Again, Big fun.

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.

On the whole though, Winning Time isn’t heavy or preachy. It mostly shifts between affectionate, wonky, and playfully ironic.

Winning Time is just a whirlwind of benign energy. I might not know a point guard from Right Guard, a power forward from a Power Ranger, or a center from a centre, but the vibrant machismo of Winning Time manages to transcend that language barrier.

If nowhere near as deft as Succession, this depiction of American sport in all its excessive razzmatazz, was nonetheless an absolute ball.

This is decidedly a candy-coated fantasy giving a slice of professional sports history the bounce of street ball. NBA devotees may find plenty to critique, but fun-seekers could do a lot worse.

All told, it’s a hell of a story for a casual fan. But diehards and mere enthusiasts may find common ground in the moments that tap into the era’s poetry.

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.

This isn’t a game-changing drama, but it’s an absurdly entertaining one.

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.

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.

“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).

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.

This show is first and foremost a love letter to not just the team but its legacy; to root for the 1979 Lakers as depicted in the show isn’t rooting for the underdog, it’s rooting for King Kong.

There's so much to like that sports fans will no doubt take an immediate shine to Winning Time. It's the non-sports fans HBO should be worried about, because there's likely little crossover appeal.

As it stands, this HBO series tells a messy, pulsating, occasionally problematic, but mostly entertaining version of the molding of a legendary basketball team. It’s not necessarily enlightening, but it is certainly a show.

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.

Like gawking fans, “Winning Time” is often content to just watch the Lakers chase titles we already know they’ll win. But once it starts considering all “the happy” that’s sacrificed along the way, those stakes make for a game worth watching.

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.

It is a touch superficial, then, but it is a lot of fun. The whole thing is given a VHS/old film veneer, and all that chest hair and bushy moustaches look the part. For a drama about greatness, though, it just doesn’t quite scale the heights.

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.

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.

A show that’s mostly just OK. But as someone who loves basketball and admires much of McKay’s earlier work, I view Winning Time as a frustrating missed opportunity.

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.

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.

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.