On the same night the season two finale of Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty aired, HBO announced its embattled but beloved Sunday night sports drama would not return for a season three. The news left me much like the show left Quincy Isaiah’s portrayal of Magic Johnson - sitting alone, despondent in the shower after losing Game 7 of the 1984 NBA Finals wondering where it all went wrong.
Winning Time was my favorite show on TV right now and, with all due respect to STARZ wrestling drama Heels (a trashier, adult Friday Night Lights that I also love), the best non-reality sports show in some time. Despite its terrible name - ESPN already has an excellent 30 for 30 documentary by the same title - Winning Time was a truly unique piece of art that won’t soon be replicated.
While Winning Time was based on actual events and used Jeff Pearlman’s Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley, and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty of the 1980s as source material, it existed in a rare category of fictionalized sports drama. There are tons of good documentary shows and movies about sports right now, particularly about basketball. Amazon Prime has both Destination NBA A G League Odyssey (another terrible name) and One Shot: Overtime Elite now streaming and there are a plethora of intriguing smaller scale docs like the TBT’s Breadwinners: Shell Shock Edition and my guy David Parfitt’s Eight Nations. But Winning Time stood alone in the realm of TV sports dramas - depicting a professional sports league in graphic detail unseen since ESPN’s unflinching football series Playmakers.
In some ways it’s a miracle this show made it as long as it did. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Jerry West both hated it from the start. Kareem, portrayed admirably by Solomon Hughes, wrote a scathing essay during Winning Time’s first season claiming the show was both dull and deceitful. While the latter was occasionally true (mostly fudging timelines for dramatic effect), the former was patently false. The show was packed full of colorful characters, beautiful basketball sequences, and unfettered 80s debauchery (the first season was particularly liberal with the sex and drugs). Jerry West on the other hand, had a more legitimate beef. Jason Clarke as The Logo gave one of the most entertaining performances on the show, but you could see why West would have a problem with it. Clarke portrays a man who I’ve always seen as a quietly intense basketball grandpa making shrewd roster moves in his sweaters as a completely unhinged lunatic always on the verge of an F-bomb infused meltdown. While that previous sentence may sound unappealing - and it was to Mr. West - it was also hilarious. The manic energy Clarke brought to the show often injected levity and never left the viewer bored.
The individual acting performances are what I’ll miss most about Winning Time. Like Clarke, John C. Reilly was often tasked with providing some humor in his portrayal of a Lakers legend. Unlike Clarke, however, Reilly’s Dr. Jerry Buss also had to act as the fulcrum of the show - the sun around which most of the other characters orbited. Reilly was believable depicting all aspects of Dr. Buss from shrewd businessman to absentee father to Jeanie and her brothers to surrogate father to Magic and the team to charismatic playboy. Speaking of Magic, Quincy Isaiah was phenomenal as Reilly’s co-lead. Magic Johnson has spent the last 40 years appearing on our TV screens, so to find someone that could believably portray his effusive energy, infectious smile, and physical size would seem to be an impossible task. Isaiah passed with flying colors - he was believable as a basketball player and a kid from Lansing trying to find himself.
With apologies to the aforementioned, as well as DeVaughn Nixon (portraying his dad Norm), Molly Gordon (who you may know from FX’s The Bear), and Sean Patrick Small (a somewhat deranged, but dead-on Larry Bird), Adrien Brody gives the best performance on the show and one of the best on all of television right now as Pat Riley. Because of the shows’s premature demise, most of the characters on Winning Time don’t get full character arcs. Brody’s Riley is the exception as we see him go from hanging onto his life in basketball by a thread as the erstwhile broadcast partner of a particularly profane Chick Hearn in season one to Armani suit wearing NBA champion we think of him as today. Like Isaiah, Brody brings the right physicality to Riley but blended with an Oscar winning acting pedigree that commands attention in every scene.
Despite all of the above, Winning Time never found its audience and ends prematurely after just two seasons. The producers were at least able to tack on a montage showing how things panned out for our heros, avoiding an ignoble ending where the deplorable Celtics celebrate at the expense of all the characters we came to know and love. Still, I was looking forward to seeing the ‘84-85 revenge tour, Magic taking over as leader of the team from Kareem, and the Succession-style Buss family drama.
If you haven’t seen Winning Time there’s still time to correct that and it is worth checking out on HBO or MAX even though the series will never be complete. The basketball scenes are gorgeous and the performances will stick with you. Winning Time didn’t get a twenty year Kareem career, but it burned bright and fast in true Showtime fashion.