Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty is a hugely entertaining look at ‘American dingbattery’

The on-court rivalries, relationships and sex lives of Magic Johnson’s LA Lakers make for a hugely entertaining, madcap series from Adam McKay.

John C. Reilly, Jason Clarke, and Quincy Isaiah in Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty.

There’s no escaping Adam McKay at the moment. The subversive writer, director and producer is all over film and is dominating TV, mischievously and successfully doing what he calls “a mixture of funny stuff, commentary, and trying to screw with the audience”.

He describes himself as “someone who makes stuff” and, already an Oscar winner for The Big Short, he’s up for another this year with Don’t Look Up, his surreally entertaining movie about how no one cares when they learn a doomsday comet is heading for Earth. It also happens to be Netflix’s second most-viewed original film, after Red Notice, in its first 28 days.

He’s also executive producer of the best TV show of the decade in Succession, having directed the pilot, setting the show up and creating the mesmerising, immersive style. He started in movies with Will Ferrell, a friend and collaborator since they both started at Saturday Night Live in 1995, putting his name in lights with classic comedies like Anchorman, Talladega Nights and Step Brothers, but has moved on to different kinds of projects in recent years. And awards keep following him.

As the writer Sam Schube recently drolly suggested, the early movies were written as broad comedies “but in hindsight look more like slightly exaggerated portraits of a nation in a permanent state of tragic, hilarious crisis”. And his latest TV series for HBO, Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty, is another masterful, hugely entertaining look at what Schube calls “American dingbattery”.

It’s a madcap, full volume, highly stylised account of the creation of the Magic Johnson-led Los Angeles Lakers of the 1980s, which saw the charismatic Johnson win five championships with the franchise, alongside Kareem Abdul Jabaar and his trademark ambidextrous “skyhook” shot. And, of course, it all takes place against the backdrop of seismic cultural and economic changes in America.

Dubbed Showtime, the era-defining Lakers turned basketball into entertainment at their home venue, the Forum, which even sported a nightclub and the dancing Laker Girls, and were without much argument the greatest team to take the court.

The encyclopaedic series — which now appears open-ended, possibly to be indefinitely extended like The Crown — follows the players’ marriages, abundant sex lives and on-court rivalries. It is an adaptation, with some fictionalised elements we are told at the start, of the book Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty of the 1980s, written by Jeff Pearlman. Publication put the former Sports Illustrated columnist instantly on The New York Times bestseller list. Now in his 50s, he remembers how as a kid growing up in New York TV networks usually just showed one major NBA matchup a week. And the excitement machine called the Lakers usually were one of the teams in it. “I fell in love with the opening shot of palm trees outside the Forum and the Laker Girls. And Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar seemed larger than life. When I was thinking of the next book to write, the characters seemed so enormous, it sparked a boyhood nostalgia.”

McKay, too, loves the game and says he was giddy about working on Winning Time as it involves everything he loves. “It’s about class, race, culture, this transformative moment, and then basketball, which of course I’m a huge basketball fan, so it’s kind of a dream show.”

But it was one of those Hollywood projects that seemed like it would never happen, taking eight years of development to eventuate after writer Jim Hecht reached out to the sceptical Pearlman, who even as he signed HBO’s contracts had little idea who McKay was. “It was never on my radar,” he says. “It’s not like I wrote books thinking that it would be great if these became TV shows. It wasn’t something that was in my head until my first book was optioned years ago. It was about the 1986 New York Mets (The Bad Guys Won!). That was the first time I realised there was this thing where they option your books.”

Quincy Isaiah in Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty.

The series was created by Hecht, who originally optioned Pearlman’s book, and Max Borenstein, the writer of Godzilla and Kong: Skull Island, though it’s obvious the biggest influence on the series is executive producer McKay, who also directed the pilot. His crafty fingerprints, satiric calling cards and comic sensibility are apparent in every frame. Along with his gift to cut through arcane jargon and explain complex ideas and notions in the most entertaining and aesthetically startling way to an audience which may have no comprehension of them.

The first episode “The Swan” actually begins in 1991 with Magic Johnson receiving his diagnosis of HIV. The news stunned the nation and an assistant is seen bursting into tears.

Abruptly we are back in 1979 where Dr Jerry Buss, played brilliantly by John C. Reilly, a wealthy businessman, chemist, real estate investor, poker player and philanderer has just finished having sex with a young blonde in a lavish suite at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion.

He breaks into a captivating monologue as he parades through rooms full of naked people. “Goddamn it, basketball, look at it, it’s like great sex,” he chortles. “It’s moving, it’s rhythmic, up close and personal. There’s no pads or helmets for protection, it’s just guys out there trying to get the ball into the hoops. If there’s two things in this world that make me believe in God, it’s sex and basketball.”

He believes he can make basketball appeal to “young people, hip people, forgive the expression, the sort of people you might want to have a little fun with”.

He wants to buy the Lakers, who have had a miserable few years, a “shit streak of a f..king team” according to volatile coach Jerry West (Jason Clarke), but Buss believes he needs a partner in the phenomenally gifted young college star Magic Johnson (Quincy Isaiah). It’s of little concern that the Lakers already have a superstar in Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (Solomon Hughes). The first episode largely revolves around the cunning Buss’s attempts to outmanoeuvre the oleaginous current owner Jack Kent Cooke (Michael O’Keefe). While he has a handshake deal, he has yet to raise $15m in a month to seal it. He’s emboldened somewhat knowing that Cooke is facing a divorce settlement so large it eventually broke a world record.

This is where the title of the episode is explained. Seeing a swan, Buss explains that it might just be the most graceful bird on Earth, “but underneath they’re paddling up a f..king storm” – and can the redoubtable Buss paddle.

“I didn’t make a fortune betting on the sure thing. I made it buying low, and selling high,” Buss says in another of his asides to camera. The second story here is the way Buss deals with Johnson; the young dude is one cool negotiator and knows how to play hardball, even if West is convinced he’s too likeable to be a great player because, “he smiles too much”.

Hugely entertaining, even if like me you know little of the game, the series is directed by McKay in great form, happily exhibiting all of his trademark storytelling tricks. All the characters break the fourth wall and speak directly to viewers, often just for comic effect. There’s slow motion, split screen, unexpected music stings, snippets of ’80s TV commercials, abrupt flashbacks, animation and a garish use of chyrons, those superimposed captions. (Like the introduction to the divisive Clippers owner Donald Sterling as “the second worst ‘Donald’ of the ’80s”.)

Cinematographer Todd Banhazi (Hustlers) brings all this to vivid life. He not only effortlessly blends existing period footage of games and interviews, with a multifaceted narrative style, but develops a grainy and smoky pictorial aesthetic, taken from advertising photography of the period. “That era was like a dirtier glam,” he says. “It had a greasy look, filled with men with lots of chest hair and skin oil. There was all that shine and money, and all that was part of it, too.”

Banhazi shot much of the series on both 16mm and 8mm film in the style of late ’70s movies. “The best version of the 8mm stuff was when you just had a little pistol grip and it felt like a dad at a barbecue, filming his family. The more we created with that in mind, the more that look we wanted came through in the footage.” He also found in dusty warehouses around LA Ikegami tube cameras which had been used in the early ’80s to shoot actual basketball games for TV. They were used in the show not only to reproduce the Laker games but also in narrative scenes, providing the right blurry and streaky period effect.

As Banhazi says, the show is like jazz pictorially, a wonderful American culture mix tape, a collage of America at that time.

Like Magic, may it run and run.

Winning Time streaming on Foxtel On Demand and Binge.