Okay, the 1980s Lakers Were Great—What Else?
Lakers #Lakers
In the first season of Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty, it took five episodes before anyone played a professional game of basketball. The HBO show, created by Max Borenstein and Jim Hecht, dramatizes the “Showtime” Los Angeles Lakers, a dominant team whose reign began with the drafting of Magic Johnson in 1979 and continued through the ’80s, expanding the NBA’s reach and transforming basketball into a television powerhouse to rival baseball and football in America. But its first season was only so interested in the actual on-court competition. Instead, the show trudged through locker-room rivalries, boardroom subplots, and the business machinations of the owner, Jerry Buss, before finally staging a tip-off halfway through, for Magic’s first Lakers game.
Season 2, which began airing last month on HBO’s rebranded Max service, is the complete opposite: a pedal-to-the-floor dash through four years of Laker history that wraps up an entire NBA season in its first episode. That’s partly because of the history it draws from—Magic Johnson’s first year with the Lakers was a dramatic series of twists and turns that ended in a championship, while his second was largely derailed by a knee injury. But it’s also weirdly emblematic of the strange stretch-and-snap formatting of so much streaming-exclusive television, wherein a plodding, overly methodical first season is followed by one that seems almost panicked, rushing to push out more plot lest its mercurial corporate overlords decree cancellation. For this new season of Winning Time, that format has created a particular sense of factual whiplash, trying to cram a hundred pounds of ’80s NBA facts into a 10-pound bag.
When Winning Time launched, it was lauded as a potentially major new HBO drama—produced by Adam McKay (who shepherded Succession to great success at the network) and featuring a star-laden cast, including John C. Reilly (as Buss), Adrien Brody, Jason Segel, and Jason Clarke. The first season was the target of some criticism from the NBA community for its perceived inaccuracies, but it was enough of a hit to merit a renewal, with following seasons promising to further the Showtime Lakers’ sprawling narrative. Things that a casual basketball fan would remember from that era—such as Pat Riley’s managerial career or Magic Johnson’s rivalry with Boston Celtic Larry Bird—were barely touched on in Season 1, which helped it feel like a diverting appetizer to a hefty main event.
Only now the second season is stuffing its face, trying to throw in a little bit of everything as it marches the team from 1980 to 1984 over the course of seven episodes. That run, which is slated to conclude this month, will encompass a major coaching change, three NBA Finals appearances, and the true dawn of the Magic-Bird rivalry, which became the lynchpin of the league’s exciting ’80s. But the truncated story feels agitated; whereas the first season perhaps spent a little too much time on Buss’s mortgage application for the L.A. Forum, Winning Time is now a glitzy scroll down a Wikipedia page, lobbing important details at the viewer without much care for nuance.
The show’s biggest assets remain Quincy Isaiah, who plays the exuberant Johnson, and Solomon Hughes as his taciturn counterpart, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. As the show’s toughest pieces of casting—they have to be physically credible and good at acting—both continue to succeed at embodying the athletes’ respective (and famously oppositional) energies without doing cartoonish impersonations. Sean Patrick Small, who plays Bird, is given a little more material as the player’s backstory is fleshed out this season, but he’s still largely there to wordlessly hit three-pointers while staring at Johnson like an assassin.
Bird was, to be clear, a cold-blooded, trash-talking hayseed legend, but 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. Jerry Buss, who continues his habit of narrating plot to the camera, remains a happy-go-lucky businessman who’s fond of brassy risks and pretty ladies. General Manager Jerry West (Clarke) is a bullheaded former star who can’t help but say “fuck” between every other word. Coach Paul Westhead (Segel) is a Shakespeare-quoting egghead with not enough empathy for his players, while his deputy, Pat Riley (Brody), is waiting in the wings for a job even the most lapsed NBA fan knows he’ll get. Though there’s some effort this year to elevate characters such as Jerry’s daughter, Jeanie (Hadley Robinson) and Johnson’s girlfriend, Cookie (Tamera Tomakili), they function largely as sounding boards and roadblocks; it’s an unavoidably male show bouncing a dozen puffed-up egos against one another.
A sense of inevitability runs through Winning Time’s second season, something the first season did manage to avoid. The 1979–80 Lakers took an odd, ramshackle journey to triumph, losing one coach to a bicycle accident midway through the season and Abdul-Jabbar to a sprained ankle in the NBA Finals. But the subsequent years have the momentum of a freight train, as great supporting actors surround Johnson and Abdul-Jabbar, and Riley is elevated to a head-coach spot he’d hold for the rest of the decade. Yes, there are some spicy behind-the-scenes tales of infighting and romantic drama (particularly involving Johnson), but it’s salacious filler for a well-trodden tale. The Lakers end the ’80s having won the most titles, with Johnson just edging Bird out in their generational rivalry. They become the new standards for enduring basketball excellence, at least until another superstar arrives to displace them.
That raises a larger question: Could any NBA narrative make for a continually compelling drama series? Obviously, the sport has seen its fair share of tumultuous roads to victory for megastars, such as the Lakers’ Shaq-Kobe pairing of the 2000s, LeBron James’s “Heatles” era in Miami, and the recent Steph Curry–led Warriors dynasty. But it all seems like better fodder for some juicy documentary many years down the line, when athletes might be comfortable enough to talk some real smack, as Michael Jordan and his teammates did on ESPN’s The Last Dance in 2020. Winning Time remains diverting in spurts, but it’s offering a telling lesson about sports narratives: The real thing is always going to be tough to substitute, no matter how many stars you can bring in off the bench.