Winning Time

Jerry West, Magic Johnson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Norm Nixon, and Jerry Buss threw the lob so that modern-day athletes could embrace a capacity for influence in ...

An added layer, Julianne Nicholson (Cranny McKinney), Tamera Tomakili (Earlitha “Cookie” Kelly), and Sarah Ramos (Cheryl Pistono) play the romantic partners of players and coaches. Altogether, Winning Time: the Rise of the Lakers Dynasty accentuates the bold and unique psyches amid halls of The Forum. The production team excels at balancing vintage motifs, humor, and styles. HBO and HBO Max roll out episodes of original drama series Winning Time: the Rise of the Lakers Dynasty every Sunday at 9 p.m. ET and PT. Actors cast as Lakers players during the Showtime period include: Quincy Isaiah (Magic Johnson), DeVaughn Nixon (Norm Nixon), Solomon Hughes (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), Delante Desouza (Michael Cooper), Jimel Atkins (Jamaal Wilkes), Austin Aaron (Mark Landsberger), and Jon Young (Brad Holland). The coaches, players, executives, and cheerleaders of the Showtime era all contributed to the legacy of the Los Angeles Lakers being an unparalleled franchise in the National Basketball Association’s 75-year history. Wigs and gym shorts heavy, the 70s and 80s are in full force in HBO’s latest period drama.

“The Swan” begins a dozen years after the events of the rest of the episode. Earvin Johnson Jr., better known to the world as Magic, is sitting in a doctor's ...

In this case, it was because the NBA’s rules at the time required any team signing a player in free agency to send a future first-round pick to that player’s former team. So because the Jazz signed Lakers forward Gail Goodrich in 1976, they had to forfeit their pick three years later after being the worst team in the league (and as they were about to move from New Orleans to Salt Lake City). In 1982, the Lakers had literally won an NBA championship 22 days before they were able to take James Worthy first overall thanks to a trade with Cleveland in February of 1980. * Regarding Magic’s oft-discussed height, Google lists Quincy Isaiah as six feet three (which often but not always, for actors, means an inch or two shorter), which is much more of a traditional point guard height than the real Magic’s six-foot-nine-inch stature. And its star player was Jerry West, who is introduced here (as played by Jason Clarke, swapping out his native Australian accent for a West Virginia growl) as a spectacularly profane, self-loathing man so tightly wound it’s a wonder he doesn’t constantly spring off the ground. It wasn’t just that AIDS was still largely believed to be a plague on the gay community, and that Magic was straight as far as anyone knew(*). It was that Magic Johnson was as famous and beloved for his exuberant life force as he was for his ability to throw no-look passes. * Finally, the 1979 NBA draft was one of two times in the Showtime dynasty when the team got the top pick despite having made the playoffs the season before. To add to the joke, we see Kareem being even meaner to “Joey” in real life than he is while playing co-pilot Roger Murdock. When Magic and Norm wind up at the same white party — appropriately thrown by Donald Sterling, who would later buy the Clippers and even later be kicked out of the NBA for being too openly racist to be ignored — Norm challenges his would-be usurper to a game of one-on-one, in hopes of scaring Magic back to another year at Michigan State. It’s an unfair contest: Magic had otherworldly court sense and playmaking ability, but he was a middling athlete by NBA standards, and one-on-one wouldn’t play to his strengths, especially against a smaller and quicker opponent like this. It’s very far removed in time from the series’ present-day action, nor does it exactly represent the end of the Showtime Lakers. (Their final title was a few years earlier, several key players had already moved on, and Magic had already begun to slow down as a player.) It’s not even the opening to Jeff Pearlman’s book (Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley, and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty of the 1980s) on which Winning Time is based. (The combover alone creates far more problems than it solves, first impression-wise, even in a time before Michael Jordan made it more acceptable to embrace baldness.) Nonetheless, he’s able to outmaneuver Cooke and buy the team. But this is a charming start to their journey, regardless of how it will one day end. And his girlfriend Cookie (Tamera Tomakili) breaks up with him rather than attempt a long-distance relationship once he’s playing in L.A.

How the new HBO show 'Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty,' represents Los Angeles with the all star 1980s NBA team of Magic Johnson, Jerry Buss, ...

Winning Time isn't all that interested in exploring the Black community just outside of the red doors of the venue that Buss wants to turn into a haven for famous people who can sit on the sidelines. He wants basketball to feel like a night at the Mansion. There will be excitement and celebrities and boobs, the latter of which will come in the form of the halftime entertainment, the dancers that would eventually become known as the Laker Girls. People from Los Angeles know that it's image-centric reputation is often misleading, but that's also what puts butts in seats and sells plane tickets. But Buss isn't just pitching him on the idea of the Lakers. He's pitching him on the idea of Los Angeles. They eat burgers and fries under the neon lights of Jim's Burgers in Boyle Heights, a casual outing turning into something out of a movie because of the drama of the car culture and the signage. According to Jim Pearlman, who wrote the book on which Winning Time is based, before the big act would take the stage at The Horn, one performer, seated at a table, would stand up and sing the word "showtime" before being joined by a chorus. In the pilot for HBO's new series Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty, Magic Johnson (Quincy Isaiah) comes to Los Angeles where Jerry Buss (John C. Reilly) tries to wine and dine him.

Solomon Hughes, Ph.D., makes his onscreen debut as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in the new HBO series "Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty."

"For a long time, it didn't look like we were going to find someone who fit the bill in terms of how he looked and seemed," Borenstein told Newsweek. "That gravitas and intellectual weight that Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has is something that you can't act. But he has a doctorate in education policy, and he teaches at Stanford, and he played on the Cal Berkeley basketball team and he's almost seven foot tall' and we thought to ourselves 'are you kidding me?'." The journey started back in 2019 when he was first cast, with the pandemic delaying the production of the rest of the series, and Hughes admits it's been a unique experience so far. A number of players from his team, (Geno Carlisle, Sean Lampley, Francisco Elson and Jamal Sampson) went on to play in the NBA. "I was through the roof. After a brief stint with the Harlem Globetrotters, Hughes instead focused on learning.

'Winning Time' review: Gratuitous nudity, the Showtime Lakers and Magic Johnson get the TV treatment from Adam McKay ... Early in the first episode of HBO's “ ...

Both on the court and off — and “Winning Time” captures none of that. “Winning Time”?! There’s so much gaudy poetry in the Showtime moniker — it’s not just a game, but a bombastic show! This isn’t the 70s of the gas shortage or anything else so depressing; this is a remembrance of things past both glitzier and hazier. Based on reporter Jeff Pearlman’s nonfiction book, “Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley, and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty of the 1980s,” the series is a stylistic pastiche, weaving in grainy film stock as if we needed a reminder this all took place in the past, as well as the occasional animated flourish. Adam McKay is the show’s executive producer (he also directs the pilot episode) and it is easy to get pulled in — it’s too fun not to. He’s a good-time Charlie with shrewd instincts, part used-car salesman, part shark, and Reilly is having the time of his life playing the type of guy who takes a hairbrush to his chest fur before heading out into the world, ready to flash a smile and get something going.

Reilly) drafted rookie phenom Earvin “Magic” Johnson (standout newcomer Quincy Isaiah), winning the first of five NBA titles in a decade. In addition to their ...

In HBO's new drama about the 1980s Los Angeles Lakers dynasty, John C. Reilly, Jason Clarke, and Quincy Isaiah make a hell of a show out of Showtime.

That series would be equivalent to the glow-down we saw in Peacock's Bel-Air, which was so desperate to be capital-P Prestige that it sucked the fun and heart out of what Will Smith and co. McKay and the team behind the production are right to drive over the speed limit in their recreation. Not everyone's a fan of the joke, though—especially the people who actually suited up for the Lakers back then. Winning Time, which stars the likes of John C. Reilly as the late Lakers czar Jerry Buss, and Jason Clarke as a wound-extremely-tight Jerry West, adds a little Adam McKay (who produces the series) flair to the historical record. Clearly, we're not supposed to assume that the true story behind it all, which saw Magic Johnson win five championships with the franchise, actually looked like what we saw on Sunday night: a jockified version of Succession. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar added, “the story of the Showtime Lakers is best told by those who actually lived through it.” (No comment yet from Jeanie Buss, the current Los Angeles Lakers owner and daughter of Jerry.) As for critics, the series has received a largely positive response, though the over the top showmanship seems to have struck a nerve.

This thought entered my mind repeatedly while watching HBO's Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty, the first episode of which premieres this Sunday.

Given that the show has signaled that it’s going to end in 1991, and that the Lakers won four more titles after 1980, and that the Showtime era’s third-most-famous player, Hall of Famer James Worthy, wasn’t even drafted until 1982, focusing so much on the earliest days of the dynasty is an odd choice. McKay recently gave an interview to Vanity Fair in which he disclosed a falling-out with longtime friend and collaborator Will Ferrell over the casting of the show. The show’s approach to sex—and there’s a lot of sex—feels similarly disjointed. This brings us to perhaps the most flummoxing aspect of Winning Time, which is the question of whom exactly it’s for. For a series about one of the most famous basketball teams in history, Winning Time shows remarkably little actual basketball. Winning Time has plenty of boobs and butts and people saying “fuck” to each other, but its historical inquiry never gets much more complex than “remember when?” The show’s fourth episode attempts to bring a critical eye to Buss’ womanizing, but it rings hollow after all the ogling of naked women the show itself has indulged in up to that point. All of this is a shame, because beneath all the hyperactive razzle-dazzle, Winning Time boasts a handful of terrific performances, starting with Quincy Isaiah, the screen newcomer cast as Magic Johnson himself. Reilly is a famously versatile performer, equally at home in comedic and dramatic contexts, but expecting him to do both within the same role is a high-wire act that requires a much better script than he’s given here. Compounding the tonal and storytelling inconsistencies of Winning Time is how the show actually looks. It’s a show about one of the most interesting subjects I can imagine that seems to fundamentally misunderstand what actually makes that subject interesting. So many different characters break the fourth wall and address the camera, and so frequently, that the show’s narrative coherence is undermined from its opening minutes.

The breakout star of Adam McKay's L.A. Lakers series opens up about nabbing the role of a lifetime.

I started going to therapy and really just bracing myself for what was about to come my way. “Honestly, I think I really needed that time to get myself right. “I had to hit mute and just start screaming. A PRODUCTION OF A Raisin in the Sun at Kalamazoo College gave him the confidence to audition for the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in L.A. A professor encouraged Isaiah: “‘You have real talent. “It was a warm room.” Isaiah got a laugh, then another on a line about being starstruck by Diana Ross. Life imitating art. “I just remember the way it made me feel.”