Critic Reviews
- Critic score
- Publication
- By date
-
Winning Time’s second season doesn’t elevate the series beyond hitting us with some truly incredible performances, but it’s serviceable television that should please more forgiving NBA fans and sports-history buffs.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.