The Frenetic Basketball Nostalgia of <em>Winning Time</em>
The 1980s Los Angeles Lakers were one of the most dominant teams in sports. At a time when professional basketball was on its heels, the Lakers brought new excitement: Magic Johnson versus Larry Bird, Jerry Buss and the glitzy Forum Club, and an up-tempo flow offense. That’s the story of HBO’s big-budget series Winning Time, whose Season 1 finale aired on Sunday, May 8.
David Sims, Vann R. Newkirk II, and Ross Andersen—three of The Atlantic’s biggest basketball fans—get together to discuss the series. What do they make of the accusations from former players that the show is inaccurately over-the-top? Does the producer Adam McKay’s style energize and streamline the show—or just add distraction on top of the glut of story lines? And how do you dramatize a history with a well-known outcome?
Listen to their discussion here:
Subscribe to The Review: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Pocket Casts
The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity. It contains spoilers for the first season of Winning Time.
David Sims: We’re here to talk about Winning Time, the HBO series about the 1980s Los Angeles Lakers, whose first season just wrapped up. It’s set during the team’s 1979–80 championship season. And it’s about Jerry Buss. It’s about Magic Johnson. It’s about Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. It’s about a million other things. It has so many people in the cast. It’s got maybe a dozen major story lines that it’s jumping around on. It’s caused Jerry West to say he wants to sue HBO all the way to the Supreme Court. It’s one of the most hyped shows of the year. Were you guys pumped for it?
Ross Andersen: I felt like I was in The Truman Show and someone had made a special pop-cultural product that was just for me. I love the Showtime Lakers. That’s where my Laker love started. My kids both wear 32 in youth basketball for Magic Johnson. We are a Magic Johnson household. So yeah, I was pumped.
It’s also funny. I know we’re going to get into this a bit later, but a lot of the controversy about how these guys were depicted … I guess I didn’t fear that so much because, to me, a lot of this stuff seemed priced into their reputations already. I certainly didn’t have any fear going in that these heroic figures of my youth were going to be unmasked or anything like that.
Right? Plenty has been written over the years about the drama of the Showtime Lakers. It’s not like any of these figures
