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.