Winning Time (HBO): A TV Review
/My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A second rate recounting of a first rate story. Just more fool’s gold from Adam McKay.
The title of the Adam McKay produced HBO series that chronicles the critical 1980 NBA season for the Los Angeles Lakers, Winning Time, subtly says a great deal about why the series is ultimately a failure.
Winning Time is based on the Jeff Pearlman book Showtime, which was aptly titled since it documented the birth and growth of the Showtime Lakers, which, along with Larry Bird’s blue-collar Boston Celtics, revitalized the NBA and the game of basketball itself in the 1980’s.
“Showtime” in this context has multiple meanings in that it refers to the Lakers flashy, up-tempo offense, Magic Johnson’s jaw-dropping passing ability, million-dollar smile and superstar charisma, and the team’s new glitzy, Hollywood-friendly image.
But “Showtime” is also a cable channel and HBO’s main competitor, so they couldn’t name the series “Showtime” despite that being the perfect name. It would be like McDonalds naming their new burger the Burger King.
So, “Showtime” was jettisoned and the series became the banal and boring Winning Time, which sounds eerily similar to the 90’s Saturday morning show and Saved by the Bell wannabe, Hang Time, about a high school basketball team. Hang Time starred former NBA player Reggie Theus and gave the world Anthony Anderson, and also set the art of acting back to the Stone Age.
Winning Time is little more than a glossier, glitzier, adult-version of Hang Time. In case you were wondering…that’s not a compliment.
Winning Time attempts to do the near impossible, make a compelling drama/comedy that has a cultural/political agenda and is filled with famous real-life characters, while believably capturing the essence of professional basketball as played at the time.
Ultimately, the series clangs off the rim in its shot at greatness because it is so ham-fisted in nearly everything it tries to do.
As a basketball fan the thing that was most uncomfortable about watching Winning Time is that the basketball in it is just cringe-worthy. This is not surprising since basketball is a very difficult sport to fake – see White Men Can’t Jump for proof of that, and in high school the drama nerds were too busy starring in Brigadoon rather than on the basketball court.
In recreating the 1980 Lakers (and their opponents) you first have to find actors who are big enough to be believable, and who share a resemblance to their famous characters. Once you have that…which is no easy task, then those actors need to be able to play decent basketball, which is highly unlikely since if they could be as remotely good at basketball as the character’s they portray, they wouldn’t be two-bit actors.
Quincy Isaiah is a perfect example. Isaiah has a passing resemblance to Magic Johnson, and does an excellent job of capturing young Magic’s exuberant essence off the court. But on the court, Isaiah’s pudgy physique and his lack of basketball skill is, frankly, distracting and embarrassing.
Most of the rest of the players, be they Lakers or Larry Bird or Dr. J, suffer a similar fate, and no matter how much the director’s try and hide the awkward un-athelticism on display, you simply can’t tell this basketball story without showing basketball, and the basketball on display is an abomination.
The only real exceptions are Solomon Hughes as Kareem, and DeVaughn Nixon as Norm Nixon, and even they more look the part than actually play it.
Hughes is a 7-footer who played at Berkley and had a cup of coffee in the NBA. He perfectly captures the sullen brooding of Kareem off the court, and while his skyhook is definitely a bit wonky (which begs the question…why has no big man over the last 50 years tried to emulate the single most successful basketball shot in the history of the sport – Kareem’s skyhook?) he makes for a somewhat believable presence on the court.
As for Devaughn Nixon, he looks so much like Norm Nixon it freaked me out…but then I looked him up and he’s Norm Nixon’s son, so mystery solved.
Unfortunately, most of the non-basketball playing cast members throw up an airball as well.
For example, Jason Segel’s over-acting as assistant coach Paul Westhead is high school drama club reject level of awful. Segel’s Westhead is a feckless, Shakespearean fancy-pants with no lips and even less balls. Segel may be charming in various comedies, but he is an absolutely atrocious dramatic actor.
Adrien Brody, whose face looks like it was found in Picasso’s garbage bin, is, astonishingly, supposed to play super model-looking, Gucci mannequin and future Hall-of-Fame coach, Pat Riley. Brody is appallingly bad in the role. And watching Brody try to chew gum like Riley is one of the more alarming things I’ve ever witnessed, it’s like watching a brain-damaged camel chew on a truck tire.
Jason Clarke plays Laker icon Jerry West, aka The Logo, like he’s auditioning for a community theatre production of The Shining. West has made a stink about his portrayal in the series and is threatening legal action, and frankly, I don’t blame him. Clarke is a fine actor, but his choices as West are so absurd as to be insane.
One of the lone bright spots is John C Reilly as Dr. Jerry Buss. Reilly captures the degenerate clown show that is Jerry Buss. Buss, like many successful men of that generation, was a delusionally depraved douchebag and thought of himself as a cross between Hugh Hefner and James Bond.
Of course, Reilly’s Buss is funny because he’s so ridiculous in his tight jeans, unbuttoned shirt and with his scientifically impossible comb over, but he’s also pathetic, manipulative and disgusting, as he keeps pictures of all his sexual conquests and uses his wealth and the terminal illness of his mother to basically sexually assault a nurse.
Buss’s smoke and mirrors purchase of the Lakers, and his revitalization of the team, which ultimately led to the birth of the modern NBA, is an important story, but Adam McKay is incapable of properly telling it.
McKay uses his usual bag of tricks, like breaking the fourth wall and using different film stocks to give a visual flair to things, but this doesn’t elevate the material but rather feels like empty parlor tricks.
Winning Time, like all of McKay’s “serious” works, is loaded with the director’s personal politics, in this case there’s a plethora of pandering regarding misogyny and the patriarchy. These cultural political issues in Winning Time are a lot like McKay’s various filmmaking quirks in that they feel manufactured and used to cover up fundamental flaws in the storytelling.
McKay came to fame as Will Ferrell’s comedy caddy and then made the leap with the extraordinarily impressive The Big Short. The Big Short was a stunning achievement, one which I never would have thought a director like McKay could’ve made…but he did it.
But since The Big Short, McKay has tried to tackle equally complex material and has floundered. Vice, the story of Dick Cheney, was an ambitious failure. Don’t Look Up was a scattershot attempt to make a climate change satire, and it fell flat. As more time passes and more “serious” McKay projects see the light of day, it becomes more and more clear that The Big Short wasn’t the beginning of a great run, but rather an outlier from an ambitious but artistically very limited storyteller. Winning Time is just more proof of this thesis.
Ultimately, Winning Time is a loser because it’s a story of Shakespearean scope and scale about basketball made by someone who has neither any genuine insight into human nature nor a true understanding of the complexities of the game. As any big man worth his salt would say as he swatted a sorry shot into the third row, I say to Adam McKay and Winning Time, “get that weak shit outta here!”
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