What to Think About Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty: A Dialogue
Reading our past dialogues on this site, someone might think that all we do is watch the masterpieces of modern cinema. Someone might be surprised to learn, for instance, that I have now watched and re-watched every series of Taskmaster, and listened to most of the podcast episodes, and we hosted our own Taskmaster dinner party via video conference during the COVID lockdown. I’m sure there will be a blog post on that some day. But my spouse and I have certainly established between ourselves that we’re generally too tired to watch art films all the time.
So we watch a lot of random tv also. And not all of it is highbrow! I mean, most of it is.
But I’ve written extensively on the concept of middlebrow art, and I think one of the things that defines the current era of TV is that there are many middlebrow tv shows masquerading as highbrow. Like, dozens of shows took their cues from the Golden Age of TV–which to my mind lasts from The Sopranos to the downfall of Louis CK, roughly 1999 to 2017–and they use high production values and high-cache actors and directors to engage with proven intellectual properties in a way that’s not particularly challenging and doesn’t make an interesting statement about the human condition.
I’d throw into this category a few shows we’ve recently watched,* and a lot of shows I’m not really interested in.** And of course, there have been a handful of genuine masterpieces in the last few years as well.***
So, one of the shows we’ve been watching that I’ve been finding unnecessarily, frustratingly middlebrow is Winning Time: the Rise of the Lakers Dynasty. It has the makings of a great tv show–fantastic cast, quality direction, adequate budget, fabulous story and IP that isn’t (to me) totally worn out and cliched. Yet nearly every episode ends and I think ‘wow that was cool…wait, did it kind of suck?’ (At least one episode definitely sucked.)
Let’s interrogate this. I thought we could collect our feelings today, before we watch the season one finale, and then have a “part 2” below and decide whether it closed strong enough for a second season watch.
Oh, I would be delighted. First of all, I have adopted “Knows about Sports” as part of my personal brand, mainly so that when I am at physical therapy and someone is sticking needles in my ass and going on about the Patriots at the same time, I have something to say in return.
Which is funny, because part of my professional brand is “important enough to unapologetically not be into sports, fucking deal with it.”
Privilege.
At its most benign.
I thrive in sports discourse that happens completely outside of actual sports being played, so when my sports discourse podcasts decide they want to discuss this show, I feel exquisitely prepared to listen and engage.
I have noticed a pattern in these podcast discussions: the people involved spend 15-20 minutes shitting all over this show, and listening to them talk I feel like yep, they have a point, why am I even watching it in the first place? It’s full of what feel like weird and unnecessary choices that draw attention to its showiness. The portrayals of various real-life characters are all over the map. They’re focusing on aspects of the story that feel stretched and inflated. There’s not enough actual playing of basketball.
Yet, they conclude these segments by saying “yeah but I’m really enjoying this show and will definitely keep watching!” and all of a sudden I am once again confused about how I actually feel. I, too, have watched each episode of the show, and in this house we do not really stick with shows we don’t actually like! Does that mean we like it?
I think there’s a fair amount to like. There’s also so much grist for the take mill. The show is basically built for podcasting. It’s familiar IP, almost like a superhero story or religious/foundational myth, and people do have emotional attachments to these larger-than-life sports figures much like superheroes and gods. Except that (1) the people are mostly still alive, and (2) there are stats and videos and memoirs, so you can dive as deep as you want into the ‘was it really like that’ rabbit hole, and question the degree of artistic license and speculate about how you’d tell the story based on your own experience of the same events.
This is one of the few times when I actually do kind of wish I had real knowledge about sports and not podcast-acquired knowledge; then I might feel more willing to put a stake in the ground here.
Things I like and look forward to seeing onscreen:
Any scene with Gaby Hoffman (there are not enough, maybe because she is too busy doing her damn job and not groping anyone)
Adrien Brody as Pat Riley celebrating things
Any scene with actual basketball being played
Kareem being like “I’m your real dad and my approval is the only fungible good” (I know Kareem himself is not a huge fan but I think he is portrayed pretty reverently!)
Things that make me want to look at my phone even though the only thing on my phone is work:
I never thought I would say this about one of my favorite actors but all of the scenes with John C. Reilly as Dr Buss, I am all the way out at this point and I no longer want to see that dude win. Do the showrunners think I am rooting for him? Are they out of their minds?
Jack McKinney, he was so mean to Jason Segal!
I think I agree with all of those. Gaby Hoffman/Claire Rothman in particular, I wish I could say more, but basically just underutilized.
Jason Segal/Paul Westhead I could spend less time with. This is a show that really dwells on some characters for too many scenes. Like I get it, Westhead is torn between his loyalty for McKinney and his own success and ambition and he’s being pushed by Pat Riley. I don’t need four episodes of Jason Segal being angsty. I saw Forgetting Sarah Marshall, that was enough for a lifetime. But similar to all the Jerry Buss scenes getting angsty about his mom, they just sit on that angst for a lot of scenes, and do nothing with it. Meanwhile we breeze through most other characters’ story arcs with like a scene and a half of story development. Basically they could’ve cut two whole hours out of this show. They could’ve cut the entire Paul Westhead character! Now that would’ve been ballsy storytelling.
I intentionally mixed character name/actor name in my comment because I can’t be bothered to remember Paul Westhead’s name.
On that note, let’s take a moment with the elephant in the room, which is that this is based on real people yadda yadda yadda. I want to get my take out there: I don’t give a fuck about it, do not care whatsoever if they’re portraying Jerry West too harshly or whatever.
Yeah. They can pry Jerry West snapping a golf club in half from my cold dead fingers. And he gets to have redemptive moments! I don’t have any time for that take. The dude doth protest too much.
These are people that became gods in the public eye. When I was three years old (1989) I knew who Jordan and Magic were. Little white kids playing ball on a five foot hoop in a backyard, fighting over who got to be Magic Johnson. These guys have been famous for decades and turned themselves into brands. They lived lives of insane privilege.
Part of that is that people tell stories about you. And they make them into good stories by building an arc and whatever. You want to be famous and successful and rich and also have complete control of your brand and legacy? Fuck off with your lawsuit, Jerry West. (Also: the irony of Jerry West writing an 80-page letter and Supreme Court lawsuit to complain about being portrayed as an angry crackpot–delicious. But threatening a Supreme Court lawsuit AT THIS MOMENT IN TIME, WITH WHAT IS HAPPENING AT THE SUPREME COURT RIGHT NOW, having apparently no knowledge or concern over what that evokes – that makes me actually lose quite a lot of respect for Jerry West.)
So I just have no sympathy. WITH A FEW EXCEPTIONS:
–if Jerry Buss didn’t really sexually assault women, as he is very explicitly portrayed doing in one incredibly icky circumstance, that’s going a bit far. And if he did do that, do we need to make a tv show otherwise valorizing him?
That scene gave me the creeps extremely hard, and that was the moment where I turned on him for good; it was very different from him being sort of vaguely a womanizer with people who seemed to be consenting.
–I don’t feel great about the scene where Kareem tells a little kid to go fuck himself. Kareem says that didn’t happen and would never have happened. And that’s a pretty mean and unnecessary scene if it’s not true. To a lesser degree it’s similar to the Buss assault scene–it’s depicting abuse. You don’t take artistic license with that.
Yeah, that’s fair. All the podcasters are liberally citing the review that he wrote on his Substack and it sounds like that’s something he takes issue with and I get that.
Yeah. Now here is my other hot take though: I absolutely love Kareem Abdul Jabbar, I think he’s one of the great athletes of all time and the way he handled the incredible cultural moment of his heyday in the 60s to the 80s–the racism, the commercialism, just so much stuff happened–he navigated that in a way I don’t think you can ever fault, all while being, again, one of the greatest athletes ever. And he has great taste in music and literature, I mean, so much to admire in him as a person. However, his take on this situation strikes me as disingenuous (“My reaction to Winning Time is not related to how I’m portrayed nor to a need for a factual account of those years” followed a few paragraphs later by “most the people being portrayed are still alive, still have a legacy that is important to them” [sic] and “The filmmakers had access to [] information, but truth and insight were not on their agenda. Shocking moments were. There is a victim here…”) - and the title of the essay? "Winning Time" Isn’t Just Deliberately Dishonest, It’s Drearily Dull - woof. I also don’t believe for a second that Kareem’s charity or its beneficiaries will be harmed by this tv show. It’s pretty clear from his writing that he’s genuinely upset by the depiction based on how he and his colleagues are portrayed. But if he’s using that outrage and the inevitable attention he’ll receive from it to promote his charity, fine.
Ok, I don’t feel like enough of a sports fan to tell Kareem his writing isn’t very good. But I’m glad you can play that role in this dialogue.
I really want to get back to what the show thinks it is doing and what it really is doing sometimes. I feel like it really wants to be socially progressive, explicitly commenting on the way Magic is talked about (too tall or whatever) compared to Larry Bird and how clearly there was a lot of racism baked into that. I mean, the show is even more explicit about it than that. It really wants you to see “look, we are CALLING THESE PEOPLE OUT RIGHT HERE for being racist about Magic Johnson.” And there are moments when a character says “man, all the white guys are calling the shots and the black guys are playing the game and doing the work” and such. The show wants to be patted on the back for that.
Yeah, that feels really basic, hit-the-nail-on-the-head stuff. Maybe just a reminder that most people haven’t thought through, or been educated on, racial justice issues and so they need to have these things shown on a really basic level, couched in fun storytelling. (If you can’t have racial justice in public schools, I guess it has to be tv.) I mean, not to get too off-topic here, but current events have me feeling like most people in the world are pretty dumb and awful. You can’t make every tv show for smart, thoughtful people.
But in the end, they made a show where the main character we’re clearly supposed to root for is Jerry Buss, and the amount of screen time with him just being a real rich bad boy and like winking and stuff really kind of speaks for itself. That’s the story they really wanted to tell, and everything else is kind of in service of that. White guys wheeling and dealing in back rooms is what drives the plot in almost all cases: how is Jerry Buss going to pull this off? He’s a fucking mess! Look at what a fucking mess he is! Can he do it? I don’t know, let’s watch him light another cigarette and be unable to deal with the loss of his mom.
Someday, after you watch me die and you host the roast event I have stated in my will I would prefer to an actual funeral, I want you to roast me like you just roasted Jerry Buss on this show. Hopefully I won’t have earned it so thoroughly.
I’m tired of it! I’m also tired of it being like “look, we get it, these guys were shitty towards women. No no, we really get it! Seriously, look, watch some more of it to see how much we get it! Can you believe that shit? Would it help if the women showed their nipples?”
It’s really wearing on me.
And it’s like they try to excuse that by doubling down over and over. So then you have like EIGHTEEN GODDAMN minutes of him crying about his mother’s death ACROSS MULTIPLE SCENES and it’s just like ‘is she dead now? Can we move on?’ The show clearly wants us to see him as a complicated man, and ok he is, but it’s tiresome.
I feel like we’re convincing ourselves the show sucks. Why do we keep watching it? Is there anything really magnetic?
Well, my list of stuff I like is longer than the list of stuff I don’t like. Pat Riley! Kareem! Plus, when your team is winning, it just feels really good and it feels like they are our team when we are watching them.
I guess for me the really magnetic personality is Magic Johnson. He has mommy issues that I find actually compelling - you see a lot of tv characters, like Jerry Buss, that have mommy issues so they fuck a lot of women. Hooray. You DO NOT see a lot of dudes who have complicated relationships with their mothers who develop obsessive love-spreading habits. It’s fascinating to me the obsession he develops with passing the ball to his teammates, and also very much in the same vein, cunnilingus.
Yes, honestly I thought about putting Magic on my list of things about the show I always get excited to see; Quincy Isaiah is giving what is rightfully one of the most raved-about performances on the show and he’s incredibly fun to watch. He also feels like the obvious choice, which is why I didn’t immediately reach for him - the show clearly wants us to root for him almost as much as it wants us to root for Buss.
Maybe more so than Buss. The fact that it would want you to root for an owner more than a player is kind of gross, but it’s certainly walking that line.
I mean, Buss is the opening act of the whole thing and he looks right at the camera and is like “I’m going to show you how I did it.” It’s an inescapable framing. Somehow he’s an owner but still an underdog because he had to pretend about his money in order to get what he wanted.
Buss would have been better relegated to that framing story. He is certainly the inciting incident for putting together this great team and this great marketing strategy that really changed the world. But Magic is rightly presented as one of the first athletes-as-global-superstars and accordingly, having to decide how to build his public persona in the face of both unprecedented economic opportunity and extremely precedented racism. That’s a compelling story.
He is so young as he deals with all of that, and who does he know who he can really trust that can actually meaningfully guide him? His father is of course his closest confidante, but he also doesn’t want him to negotiate for a better offer because his own background and upbringing make the idea of that unfathomable. Magic really has to forge his own way.
Also a great performance from Andy Daly, among others.
So, side-take - there was some rumor-mongering surrounding this show in that maybe Will Ferrell wanted to play Jerry Buss. I guess maybe that started some beef with John C. Reilly and Adam McKay because they’re bros or whatever; that part I don’t care about. The thing is, Will Ferrell 100% ALREADY PLAYED JERRY BUSS, in one of my favorite unsung middlebrow films, Semi-Pro. It’s a late-in-his-peak-years Will Ferrell comedy in which he plays an athlete-owner of a rundown 70s pro basketball team. It is in some ways very, very similar to Winning Time, down to the scam-adjacent attendance boosting promotional strategies, the open shirts and discos, all of it. As much as I love that movie - and I do, it is one of the great dumb-fun movies about sports - I’m not sure I needed to see Will Ferrell play that character again. Or maybe I did. I don’t know. I’d love to see the same show remade with Will Ferrell. Just one episode? Yeah, I’d be psyched for that.
Ok, I’m back to having positive thoughts about the show. For the finale, I want to see:
–a lot of basketball
Less Philly erasure.
–more Pat Riley
Yes, including hair.
–minimal Jerry Buss
Gaby Hoffman can do his job anyway and is better at it.
–Magic doesn’t get AIDS
UGH I FORGOT THIS HAPPENS EVENTUALLY.
Yeah, I also forgot how genuinely shocking that was back in the day. Like, I’m fairly certain that was how I first learned (or at least heard) about sex, and STDs, and homosexuality.
CAN IT DELIVER???
PART 2: AFTER THE FINALE
I liked the part where they played all the basketball.
The basketball was pretty good. Quincy Isaiah can do a little spin move. We saw that a lot, that was pretty good.
All those dudes! It can’t have been easy to cast the various Lakers - decent actors who can do a passable impression of playing basketball, probably a small pool (then factor in that they have to look somewhat like the guys they are playing). Plus whoever edited all the footage together. Damn.
Ok, so I think we got most of what we wanted! I don’t know if that qualified as Philly erasure, but I’m not exactly in love with Philly basketball. They’ve at least never marketed themselves as America’s team, we can say that much.
They put up a good fight and genuinely seemed formidable enough, so I am satisfied. Them beating Boston to get to the finals was I’m sure a big deal IRL but all we get in the previous episode is BOSTON LOST OMG. Larry Bird still probably got more screen time this episode than Dr J but I can live with that.
Yeah. I love the trick the show plays several times, just cutting from a smiling, energetic, colorful LA to Larry Bird just being a pale dickbag with a beer, surrounded by earthtoned redneck dinge. It’s a fantastic cut, every time.
Let me throw this out to start - sixth man award goes to Wood Harris as Spencer Haywood. That wasn’t necessarily a great role. At least within the arc of 1979-80, it’s a very sad story and it didn’t have to be compelling. But Wood Harris acted the shit out of it and made me care, and he also created some space for other actors to be interesting. Kareem. Drug dealer assassin guy. Random third dude. I was there for it.
Yup, the last three episodes he has absolutely killed it (and he needed to or that story would not have belonged).
You mention casting here, and it’s worth talking about. I don’t know that all the actors looked that much like the real people. But the number of tall black guys who could play decent basketball and act competently in a prestige show had to be very small. So you get Wood Harris, who can play but is in his 40s, and you get the guy playing Julius Erving who looks as old as Julius Erving would be, like, today. (Ed.: James Lesure is 52 years old; Wood Harris is 53.) I’m impressed they got as much basketball as they did. (Shoutout to Bryan Tyree Henry, who is an absolutely amazing actor, but he bounces a basketball one time in that one episode of Atlanta and…nope, dude can’t play. You can’t fake it.)
And a lot of nice callbacks to various dramatic momenta throughout the series, including the part in the series premiere where Magic faces off against Norm Nixon and gets his ass kicked and Nixon is clearly threatened and not at all excited to be on a team with this guy, but then they have that one moment during the time-out and it’s just beautiful! It’s earned! Love that for them. Magic really did win people over, and Nixon and Kareem were probably the biggest skeptics on the team in the world of the show, but now they’re all in it together.
Yeah. The one-on-one scene in the pilot seemed over the top (and I’m sure never happened) but it did set up that arc pretty well. Similarly, the moment where it’s the Rookie of the Year voting tally that gets Magic back on his feet–I’m sure it never happened, but that’s a lovely moment and it was set up well.
What about Paul Westhead’s band of brothers speech? Did we get enough Pat Riley to fill our quota? Were we mad at Jack McKinney for showing his face after how rude he was? (I was a little)
I was moderately happy for Paul Westhead that he finally got a Shakespeare monologue that really seemed to land. And the way Riley cuts him off to just scream and connect with the guys–it really does tell you what you need to know about both of them and where they’re headed.
They worked well as a duo, and I love how Adrien Brody is like this Oscar-winning actor who now does like random recurring roles in TV shows (see also Succession, where he appears in two episodes and steals every minute he’s on screen). I could have used more of him, but that’s not to say we needed it.
He’s a fantastic actor. And the show had fantastic actors coming out the seams. Even most of the dutiful wives–Gillian Jacobs, Julianne Nicholson, Sarah Ramos. They got solid moments.
I was a little mad at Jack McKinney. But the satisfying thing about the episode is that it showed the finals bringing out the best in people. McKinney wanted the team to win. Kareem wanted the team to win. Even Spencer Heywood. Even Julius Erving (a good setup for that character, where Kareem and Jerry West teach Magic to see him as an antagonist so Magic can psychologically get past him, but you never get the sense Dr. J is a bad guy at all.) Even Magic, taking the MVP award from Kareem, you see why that happens and it’s because of those parts of him that you love and respect, and also because basketball is live entertainment and he was fucking there for the NBA to hand the award to.
It was a perfect Jerry West episode. He’s just this guy who lives the game so hard he can’t even be in the same room with it.
YES, every Jerry West moment was pure gold.
That brings me back to the historicity of the show. For whoever was bothered by that depiction, I hope this episode redeemed it a bit for them. Because it really showed you why people love basketball and why this team was so much fun to root for. And for everything Jerry West may or may not be in real life, was he really NOT a guy who was so competitive he couldn’t even handle himself? Isn’t that a pretty accurate depiction of, if not the historical Jerry West, then at least a particular kind of guy that all of us have met before and been a bit scared of but also wished we could imitate and please?
Maybe I’m projecting a bit. I had a lot of flashbacks to high school, varsity basketball. My coach, who I really didn’t like, was that kind of guy. Unable to be happy, but also unable to do anything but try to win at basketball. And as much as I really didn’t like him, part of me REALLY felt sorry for him, and part of me REALLY wanted to make him happy by basketballing properly.
The part of the show where he’s so depressed he can’t leave his guest house and we learn that this happens every season is so relatable. His arc is truly great. I loved the parts where he clearly wanted to be graceful and let McKinney coach but also he couldn’t help himself and was just butting in all the time almost involuntarily. I’m honestly mad at the IRL him who couldn’t appreciate that they built a pretty great TV character out of him. WE SHOULD ALL BE SO LUCKY.
Your coach sounds like someone who probably shouldn’t have been coaching high schoolers at a Catholic monastery school?
Sure, but also like a lot of youth sports coaches. He was better than my hockey coach at least. He didn’t physically beat me. He grabbed me once, I guess, when he was pissed I wasn’t rebounding hard enough or whatever. It was pretty innocuous. You could tell he wanted to hit me. That was enough.
There’s a certain kind of man who needs to win the thing, or at least not lose the thing. The quest for available glory and the terror of death and defeat. I’m not sure it matters what the thing is–this show makes a compelling argument for the beauty, fun and joy of basketball–but you know that if it wasn’t basketball it would be something else for all these guys.
I remember so many games, so many pep talks, my coach would be losing his mind in frustration and anger over plays run badly, missed shots, lack of hustle, losing, whatever. And I’d be sitting there thinking “you know we’re a third rate Catholic monastery high school team, right? Like, even if sports matter at all–which, let’s set our premise somewhere and say they do–this is the shittest basketball team in at least five states. Why are you letting it deprive you of all joy in life?”
But it’s not about joy. The joy of winning is extremely brief, and this show knows that. These guys win and then they have to win again, and again. They’ll never break that cycle. This show is, at its best, about those people, and gets us to like those people. Which is frankly quite an accomplishment. Because they’re raging assholes!
This show made a convincing case for why winning was so powerful for these guys. But also they were talking about winning like a national title, which is objectively a big deal. The ring! They’re going to go get them a ring! I felt like it did a satisfactory job of convincing me this was a worthy goal.
And that was the whole monologue we got from Vic Mackey in the second episode - sorry, I mean, Michael Chiklis - playing whoever the Boston owner is, I forget.
You are literally from Boston, you should know who Red Auerbach is. And he wasn’t even the owner. My god. Hilarious. You’ve heard of this Thomas Brady character, yes?
SorrrrrrrrrrY. I keep telling you to take me to a Celtics game.
Literally statues of the guy all over the city.
Yeah, him and Paul Revere and a bunch of other dead white guys. But anyway, that is his whole moment with Jerry Buss, like “oh, you think you want this, you think it will make you happy? It will make you miserable, mark my words.” The only difference is that he has accepted that he will continue to grind and do everything in his power to win, all his life, and it will bring him nothing but the most fleeting moment of satisfaction when he does win, and then it starts all over again, and there is also no other life for him.
Yeah. I guess I’m pleased that the show knows what it’s about. It is making a statement about the human condition. It’s definitely art.
Negatives on this episode? We’ve said a lot in its favor.
JUSTICE FOR JEANNIE.
I think the show tried to do a cute little feint, where you want Jeannie to be the treasurer and then you think Buss is going to give it to the boys, and then he does what was obvious all along.
Well obviously I am pro Claire being the treasurer. But fucking Jerry doesn’t even take her to the game? Takes her brothers instead? Presumably never apologizes for this appalling choice? And she doesn’t scream at him?
And what about the whole, Jerry Buss maybe raped that woman? There’s no resolution of that plotline. Are we letting that just sit there?
That’s very concerning. I think we’re supposed to understand that those were the times, and the men of the time (if not the women) would not have seen that as an assault. And Jerry Buss was in pain and made mistakes, and he’s a complicated antihero yadda yadda yadda. But this isn’t Sopranos, it’s not Mad Men. Winning Time is not succeeding on a level of character analysis where I’m questioning what is good and bad and why I root for a character even though they do unlikeable stuff. That stuff has been done better by better shows, and even if you haven’t seen those shows I’m not sure you’d understand what point is being put across here, or why.
If I had to guess, I’d say the overarching point is that Jerry Buss has deep, deep problems with women. So making Claire Rothman his new Treasurer/VP is a step in the right direction, and the show is giving him room to grow in future seasons by expressly shitting on Jeannie in season one. That makes it all the more meaningful when he hands her total control later. And the only price of that is a rape victim we see for one episode, whose perspective we never see, whose trauma will not be entertained. But she builds an arc for Jerry Buss! Good for her.
So I hope season 2 is at least kinder to Jeannie.
In the meantime I hate plot points that hinge on two people just not talking to each other. (“I’m going to need a lot of help. So go get your brothers.” “Yeah, sure dad. I’m not going to push back on that at all.”) I mean, history is very kind to Jeannie, I think we’re supposed to understand that. Apparently her position is a bit precarious in 2022, but she’s run the organization for a very long time. So I think you’ll get your wish. But if future seasons are the saga of the Buss family’s backstabby bullshit over who controls the team or whatever, I’d be pretty disappointed.
I’m not sure I’m there for future seasons. If you were going to watch more of this show, what would bring you back? What more story is there to tell?
Well, we know that more seasons are coming; at least one more. I agree that I don’t care about Buss family stuff and I don’t care about front office stuff all that much unless I get to see Jerry West stalking around an arena refusing to watch a game some more.
I always want more of the players, less of the management and owners. How does Magic mature into a leader on that team? What happens when he and Larry Bird finally do get a chance to face off? How does that rivalry grow? I enjoyed this show in the same way I enjoyed The Last Dance (which was also heavily editorialized to say the least) - I genuinely loved the players setting these scenes for us of hugely tense and pivotal moments in big games: what they were thinking, how their thoughts on it have changed over time, what the media did with it in the moment and what stories got told as a result. That’s where the fun stuff is, to me.
We know that in real life Magic and Bird became good friends. That’s an arc I’d be interested to see. And that last shot of Larry Bird in this episode is him going back out to his backyard hoop and practicing a skyhook. Poignant. I think they’re headed in that direction, making him a major character.
As I know from my favorite Scottie Pippen bedtime story, Larry Bird was known for shooting 200 free throws before school every morning when he was a kid.
Very impressive. But you know, I shot hundreds of free throws after school every day when I was in middle school and high school. I still sucked tremendously.
I’d also be very psyched to see Michael Jordan portrayed on this show.
Ooh who should they cast??
I mean, it would be amazing if they cast an actual player. Like how Ray Allen was in that Spike Lee movie. I would kill to see Ja Morant as Michael Jordan. Can’t imagine they could schedule that though, for a tv show, and hard to imagine any current player devoting their energy to being a good enough actor to carry a show.
That would be great actually, Ja Morant has the swagger for it. But it would have to be a tiny role, for that exact reason. I’d take it as a fun cameo though. Obviously if MJ is going to be a character on the show I want Pippen in there too, though.
He arrived later, right? But yes. There could be a whole sequel show on the Bulls, or maybe on the 1992 Dream Team. But it would be great if MJ showed up as this untouchable weirdo who just ruins people on the court (and can’t actually win a title yet because he doesn’t have a team built around him). They could get a real player to do that, without a lot of dialogue.
I’d be into the show if it went whole hog on 1980s culture. Like, how Magic vs. Kareem vs. Bird vs. Michael Jordan all navigated building their brands, engaging with the art and the economics of the era. I’m sure they could fit Pat Riley and Jerry Buss in with that without overloading on white guy executive shit, because you’d at least know whose side they’re on.
That said, I have to say, this is still a solidly middlebrow show to me. I think it got a few very good character studies in, and it was fun to watch at times (particularly at the end when they really invested in basketball), but generally clunkier and slower than it should’ve been, and the point it makes about winning and basketball and the male sporting experience in the 20th century is pretty obvious and unnecessary. I’m pretty iffy on season 2.
I’m back to where I started: I liked the parts where they played all the basketball. I will watch more of the show if there is more basketball.
Maybe we should just watch more basketball documentaries. Maybe we need to admit to ourselves that’s a thing we’d enjoy.
Maybe you should take me to a damn Celtics game.
Those tickets are so expensive. You are a strong woman with a job and money. You should take me to a damn Celtics game.
*Outer Range (True Detective meets Lost); Wheel of Time (Lord of the Rings meets females and people of color); Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (Mad Men meets comedy); The Mandalorian (Star Wars meets Justified); Sneaky Pete (Ocean’s Eleven meets less talent, longer run time); Ozark (Breaking Bad meets blue light filters); Fargo seasons 3-4 (Fargo (film) meets Fargo seasons 1-2).
**Ted Lasso (Parks & Rec meets European soccer); anything Marvel-related, as of this year anything Star Wars-related, any reboot of shit from the 80s and 90s (ooh, the Karate Kid thing was good! Fuck off), anything that requires me to purchase a new streaming service.
***Atlanta, Barry, Better Call Saul, Fleabag, Pen15, What We Do In the Shadows.