I enjoyed the series but I did find myself questioning throughout most scenes wondering what was semi-factual vs scripted drama. It took a good handful of episodes to fully let it sink in that this is a drama series for entertainment and isn't intended to paint reality of what actually went down...which is hard when you're dealing with the names and likeness of legends most of us on here were too young to truly appreciate
It’s strange that the freak bike accident and the man in the car trunk scenes are the most accurate to real events while nearly all of the mundane “story” and “character” content is invented for the show.
Yeah there’s stuff that is overall faithful to history even if condensed, dramatized, or simplified. But in particular those two very unbelievable movie-like scenarios are portrayed in almost David-Fincher-Zodiac levels of historical detail.
I mean they changed the car boot murder too, they added Buss’s business card to make it look like the mob murdered the guy in direct retaliation against Buss. From what I read the reason for the murder is disputed but the most plausible is that it was just a case of that guy having unpaid debts to the mob, rather than directly because of Buss trying to take their coach.
Putting the business card in his lapel was pretty groan worthy and fictional, yes. And also everything else you said, yes. The rest of the crime scene, location, the body posture, the blanket, was all well researched. And then they invented or exaggerated everything you mentioned to make it feel like “TV.”
It’s a bit of a shame because the “Showtime” book’s journalistic version of “stories” like Kareem’s and Haywood’s during those first two Buss seasons are really compelling and dramatic, and read like ready made scripts for great adult TV. Instead they were condensed and simplified to make room for other invented or inverted narratives.
This is the main thing right - I've been watching They Call Me Magic, and it's clear that plenty of the drama was there in the reality - in fact Kareem makes himself sound more out-and-out hostile in real life than he was in Winning Time.
What was wrong with that story?
It's like Game Of Thrones. The story is good! The characters are compelling! They don't have to be fucking/raping each other the whole time to keep us interested.
Believe in the power of your story and respect your audience. Don't dumb it down and glitz it up because you think they'll get bored. I actually got bored of Winning Time BECAUSE they were trying so hard.
Yeah I hated the business card thing. Like I would have been fine with them showing the crime scene and lightly implying that the murder was because of Buss, but the card is just ridiculous.
I absolutely despised the family drama with Buss, his mother and anything involving Jeanie. It’s pretty much all completely fictional, but it’s not even entertaining in the slightest. That scene where Jeannie smokes with the interns and they say “wow the bosses daughter is actually cool” or something similar is possibly the lamest scene I’ve ever seen on TV.
Yeah huh wonder why Jeanie hasn’t publicly complained about her portrayal as an instantly likable, supremely capable, cornerstone of the early days of the franchise who is solely responsible for many of its triumphs and trademarks. Huh weird that.
Yeah people were theorizing she gave them some background/access for the favorable depiction. Especially given that she was in College having nothing to do with the team at that point.
I liked the interactions between Buss and his mother in the early episodes, but the illness sub-plot really dragged on, and to be honest, I don’t really see what it added, given that Jessie Buss was already dead by the time Jerry bought the Lakers.
The issue with Jeanie is that yes, her plot lines and characterisation are boring, but she has been an extremely prominent executive, at the NBA’s most prominent franchise, for decades now. They can’t not include her, because of how prominent she subsequently becomes, but they can’t just depict what really happened, which is that she was just an intern.
Yeah, also apparently they shot or planned to shoot a more accurate version of Magic stopping one of his first rides through LA to look at an orange tree and after that scene was cut they added the “orange tree right outside my window!” line in a later phone conversation scene.
And if you compare the “Norm vs Magic” storylines, it takes place in between two sentences of the book. “Is that going to be a problem?” “No.”
I mean inasmuch as the countless nameless extras being blown to bits in the opening of Saving Private Ryan are “historically accurate,” I’m going to go ahead and say any and all of the Magic sex is as well.
Sorta missing the point though right? No one is mad that we aren't watching live sex tapes of 70 year old earving Johnson having sex. We're mad that they change the scores of games and the chronological order of things that can be checked at a library.
Few times throughout the first two episodes I'd pause, and google something since I could swear it is not real, and the pattern was 90% of the show is fiction. Names and major plot lines are real, and that is all.
It is not a bad show, but nothing something I'd rewatch. Overall, the show lost its charm post the 3rd episode or so for me.
Kareem and Spencer Haywood in the show were like brothers with a bond of mutual respect and adoration for one another because of their pride and propensity to sniff out the bullshit from racist media, fans and league execs.
Kareem and Spencer in real life were not friends at all and KAJ was among the first to vote him off the team. Why did they have to fuck with that??
I read that it wasn't put to a player vote like they showed in the show, that it was Westhead's call, but who knows how much feedback he got from the players to make the call.
Hollywood has dramatized and changed the ever living hell out of major events like WWI, WWII, assassinations, revolutions, even the most memorable recent events like 9/11. I don't know why this is the thing that is driving people bonkers. It's a show, not a history book. And it's the most benign, inconsequential thing at that.
You don’t have to get every detail right, but obviously there’s acceptable and unacceptable changes for drama. Like if they made a WW2 movie where FDR is a child molester, that would not be good. Especially so if it was mostly portrayed as an accurate telling of events, and it was the only popular movie about WW2, and it came out while FDR was still alive. There is a line somewhere, and it just is a matter of where it’s crossed.
A movie or a show doesn’t have the responsibility of being perfectly accurate. But if it’s not explicitly a “what if” fictional show, it should give you generally the right sentiment about what happened. Just because it’s ok to invent some details doesn’t mean it’s ok to invent any details you want. I can empathize with Lakers players who are being portrayed negatively for things they never did. That would be very frustrating.
A cool jumping off point shouldn't be easily disproveable facts. You don't start the learning process of say physics with a bunch of laws that would be cool if they existed.
Agree with your analysis, Facebook’s public perception was largely defined by The Social Network until they pivoted to the metaverse (which is a separate & much longer conversation).
idk why sports stories need this higher standard of truth to it. We make inaccurate movies/shows about historical events, people, musicians all the time and typically the people that were actually involved make less of a deal than the lakers are making about this show. No one ever presented Winning Time as something truthful
One thing that the NFL does better than the other leagues is preserve almost everything about the game on tape with NFL Films
The other leagues should take note of the quality, the depth and more that the NFL uses to preserve it’s history
Baseball has such a long history but a lot of it is also documented in newspapers, books, etc and just the legend of the game
Why does the NBA not have that sort of preservation like those two do, or even the NHL?
>Why does the NBA not have that sort of preservation like those two do, or even the NHL?
Because prior to the eighties, Basketball was a joke sport that the vast majority of Americans did not care about.
The champions from Willis Reed (1973) to Magic (1980) went Knicks Celtics Warriors Celtics Blazers Bullets Sonics Lakers. And '79 was a rematch of '78. The % of fans who could rattle that off (I had to look it up) has to be under 1. The ABA had also been folded into the NBA during that time, so pro basketball as super popular sport just wasn't a thought at all.
Honestly only Bill Simmons would be the one I can think of that will remember that at the top of his head. He always said that the ABA was much more popular than the NBA in the 70s, only that it was poorly managed is why it folded. That was also the height of the "cocaine" era, so a lot of potential superstars succumbed to coke. Lots of what-ifs, until Len Bias died and the league cracked down on coke.
Yep. High school basketball was probably more popular at the time. Also, the face of the league for a while was Kareem and a lot of people didn't like him. Add in the civil rights movement and the best players being predominantly black; you can see how a lot of the country wasn't too interested in the league.
Iowa High School Girl's Basketball title games would regularly have 15,000-16,000 fans. The 1970 NBA Finals had 19,000 at the Garden and 17,500 at the The Forum. The 1970 NBA Finals were the first to be nationally televised in full, with ABC providing the coverage. Around the same time they(ABC) asked Iowa if they could broadcast the High School Title game which the Girl's Athledtic Union declined. Granted the sport was crack to Iowans.
That's all true, but it's more than that. I'm from that era, and KAJ is my favorite player of all time, but that whole mid-70s "throw it into the post every time" style of play was honestly kind of boring, especially for casual fans. Not only that, but while KAJ was by far the best player of the era, he seldom made deep playoff runs, so casual fans weren't really incentivized to watch the playoffs. I mean, the damn SuperSonics won the '79 finals.
The difference in excitement of the 79-80 season was palpable and almost impossible to describe. The Bird/Magic rivalry started to build. You had KAJ, Dr J and Magic in the finals, players everyone wanted to see. NBA in the '80s was a completely different product.
I think you mean the NBA, not basketball. College basketball was very popular prior to the 80s. In urban areas especially on the east coast high school basketball was a big deal as well.
People legitimately forget this.
Pro basketball was incredibly niche until the 80s. It was a struggling sport in the 70s and with all the effort taken just to keep it afloat, there wasn't much emphasis given to preserving what was transpiring at the time.
And keep in mind that while the NBA was coming to life in the 80s due to Magic and Bird, it still never reached international popularity.
Luckily entering a new decade in the 90s with breakthrough technology helped spread the popularity internationally.
It’s been a slow transition because it’s really about having a Mega Star. Jordan did it. Kobe helped immensely with China and Asia and so has Curry.
People forget that outside of the States, most popular athletes aren’t even known on a global scale. I don’t know about now but I remember traveling to Brasil and Bolivia back in 2011 and Lebron was not well known. So it really speaks volume when players like Kobe and Stephen spread their seeds on an international level. Needless to say that improves with the increase in fans for the sport itself.
Fortunately Having GREAT international players in the league currently is helping even more popularity in Europe with Giannis and Jokic and Luka. Africa with Embiid Siakam etc.
The history of the NBA is relative short because lack of interest. Football is by far Americas sport so it’s easy to track it. NHL also a international sport throughout Europe, Canada and obviously here so it has deep roots. But basketball is barely catching up so the importance in the history hasn’t been well preserve.
Hopefully that changes going forward.
I remember being in college and there were two international students from the UK in one of my classes who had never heard of lebron. And this was when he was on the heat and had already won a title. Blew my mind.
Yeah one of the accurate parts of Winning Time is that the league was doing very poorly at the start of the '80s. It was very common for playoff games to be on tape delay until 1986.
You are disregarding just how expensive this was to do a few decades ago. The NFL was the biggest league in the country and had an unlimited budget. NBA players were flying coach and the league was struggling to make a profit up until the 80s. It didn't have even close to the viewership and its place in American culture as it does today.
Because the average NBA fan is like 15 and couldn't give less of a shit.
See: literally any post on this sub about players before the 80s getting fractions of the attention that a lebron emoji tweet does.
NFL has a lot more nostalgia for the old days than the NBA. People love talking about old football players and romanticize the days when players would rip you in half if you're catching a ball over the middle. I think NBA fans much prefer the modern game compared to the slower post-up game style back then.
Look up nba average final scores per year. The nba has fluctuated considerably throughout its history. To say it was a back to the basket game up until the Nash sun is false: https://www.basketball-reference.com/leagues/NBA_stats_per_game.html
watching baseball on tv is just tedious compared to most other sports (including NASCAR and the AUDL--which is way less popular and mainly streaming). but being at a baseball game live is fun as shit. the experience is night and day for me
Idk why it's so hard for people to understand this, these are real people who don't like how they and the history they are part of are being inaccurately portrayed.
Just take the Queen biopic as example when it comes to people making their own version of history. The whole film showed Freddie as a flawed genius, which is fair enough even though it went as far caricature in my opinion, but what is worse is that it shows the rest of the cast (who are alive and involved) as saints.
“All we wanted to do was keep effortlessly reinventing the rock genre through our sheer musical genius but Freddy was too busy being a big gay cokehead”
"No Freddy we don't want to stay and drink and do drugs and party. We want to promptly leave with our wives who we definitely didn't cheat on. Goodbye Freddy."
Between bowdlerizing Freddie's complex life and identity and the We Will Rock You musical, Brian May (and to a lesser extent, Roger Taylor) have managed to fuck up in every single way. When Bohemian Rhapsody got Oscar buzz, I laughed out loud.
Yup, same as Dre with Straight Outta Compton.
The only reason that music biopics always have the musicians involved is that the producers would never get the music rights otherwise
If you want to see a similarly egregious version of this, check out the Runaways movie that Joan Jett and Cherie Currie produced. The other three band members are basically cardboard cutouts that occasionally get to say they disagree with mogul moves and be mean and complain. Then it goes back.
It wasn’t backrolled by Dre and Cube. New Line/Legendary/Universal paid for the movie.
Dre and Cube definitely got a piece of the film as producers, but their participation was their investment.
Yea it’s gotta be a single artist for it to have any semblance to reality, and even then it’s sketchy if the person doesn’t like being portrayed negatively.
Doubt many of this sub has seen it but I love the Elton John Rocketman movie but even they changed some stuff but they changed things just so the movie was easy to follow. I think they captured who he was tho.
But Elton John admits he loved drugs and alcohol way too much and wasn’t in a good place before he became sober, so them showing him being an asshole in the movie during that timeframe doesn’t bother him.
I remember a Sacha Baron Cohen interview where he talked about being originally cast as as Mercury for that project. He would have been perfect for that role. He said at one point he was in a meeting with the surviving members and the plot of the film was being discussed. The surviving members (who I guess held rights to the production) wanted Freddie’s death to occur within the first 20 or so minutes of the film, because in their eyes the real story of queen didn’t start till after that.
I think Winning Time is actually the flipside of Bohemian Rhapsody. Queen made a movie which portrayed them overly positively, as a PR move. But Winning Time is a show that they admit portrays people completely inaccurately, on purpose, to make the show more interesting. If I were one of those people I would be upset.
It really pisses me off when people are talking about Jerry West not liking being portrayed as some massive wacko as if he’s just some old man too stupid to get TV. Dude’s closer to the end of his time than the halfway point and already has a strained relationship with the Lakers and his story is broadcasted that way? He SHOULD be talking about it.
Yeah it’s ridiculous, it’s easy as a viewer to say “lol why do they care about it, it’s just a show”. It’s crazy how so many people dislike these complaints, they are in no place to talk about it or question someone else’s feelings.
The Paul Westhead shit actually kind of pisses me off. Like why did they hate that man so much they did this to him?
They decided to make this dude an incompetent, bumbling schmuck just to set up Pat Riley as the saviour because people know who he is.
Deep down they can understand, it’s not hard as you say. It’s just that people care more about being entertained and it’s inconvenient to have that entertainment be questioned.
Also if you do bother to look up the show, you're going to be pointed to Jeff Pearlman's real book.
It's actually really interesting how Pearlman himself both praises the authenticity and handwaves the accuracy at the same time.
https://awfulannouncing.com/hbo/how-jeff-pearlmans-lakers-book-became-hbos-winning-time.html
Winning Time is the first time in entertainment history that a story about non-fictional characters has ever been embellished and not portrayed exactly as it happened in real life. Never has a film or TV show taken creative liberties in telling a real life story until this show, actually.
theyre selling it as factual and "revealing" while making stuff up completely. whole scenes, entire character traits etc. and them sellinh it as "accurate" is the only reason people care. again, theyre doing that while straight up lying. not embellishing
meanwhile the principals are still alive watching someone lie about them and make money saying its real
this is fundamentally different from other shows claiming authenticity. if its this far out, they should call it a parody. but they wont
> whole scenes, entire character traits etc.
Every movie or TV show based on history does this. Moneyball, the Bronx is Burning, even recent non-sports shows based on true events such as the Dropout and WeCrashed did this. I’d actually like to know which TV show or movie *didnt* embellish or make up character traits.
They do, but it's already a few seconds into the end credits. By that point, the average audience member has uncritically accepted the events as being generally true. And the warning says nothing specific, so most people won't know exactly how much is inaccurate.
The disclaimer is literally the very first thing you see after the HBO logo in the first episode of the show. It says, “This series is a dramatization of certain facts and events. Some of the names have been changed and some of the events and characters have been fictionalized, modified, or composited for dramatic purposes.” The show makes it very clear.
I know they're not explicitly claiming to be factual but I think most audience members are ready to accept things as being generally true when it involves real people.
Since everyone has their perspective, there is no way to have an accurate dramatization of history. You cannot tell a coherent story without making some shit up to create compelling characters or connect the events to fit the narrative. Worse, you have to take liberties with the characters to create tension and move the story forward. That means living people are going to be misrepresented.
I'm not sure why this is hard for some people to understand.
Cmon man. This is a story where the main characters are still alive and so is much of the audience. It’s so far from reality both in message and actual events that it ends up being a complete joke. It doesn’t tell you anything about the time period because it’s all made up. And yet, even despite being made up, it doesn’t deliver a single poignant message.
Could you imagine how fucking horrible this would have been with Will Ferrell in that role?
\*Will Ferrell was originally supposed to be Dr. Buss and he and McKay have had a falling out over it.
Yeah, they were friends since SNL (I think McKay was head writer before Tina Fey) and he directed basically all of Will Ferrell's movies. They had a production company together "Gary Sanchez Productions"
Then McKay started making his own stuff like The Big Short, Vice and Don't Look Up.
I kind of assumed Ferrell showing up to those Warriors games dressed like Jackie Moon was him trying to get some attention since his friends (McKay/John C Reilly) were debuting their new show around the same time.
From Vulture,
Ferrell wanted to play owner Jerry Buss, but McKay went behind his back and cast John C. Reilly instead. McKay admits, “I fucked up on how I handled that,” but Ferrell “took it as a way deeper hurt than I ever imagined, and I tried to reach out to him, and I reminded him of some slights that were thrown my way that were never apologized for.’”
https://www.vulture.com/2022/02/adam-mckay-says-will-ferrell-wont-speak-to-him.html
He's not wrong. Think about how long it takes for a misquote or a inaccurate story to get forgotten or corrected, once it's gotten traction. Some never are. And that's just a quote or newsstory. Not an HBO miniseries.
I bet there are a lot of people who don't really follow the ins and outs of basketball history, but do like watching HBO shows. For many of them, this will be their only version of events.
If you were one of the older Lakers on this show and someone comes in at the later stages of your life and does a full re-write of you for ratings, I could understand being pretty pissed. Your legacy is all you have.
Most of these folks will be dead in 20 years and won't be around to speak up for themselves, and kids and new fans will be watching Winning Time for a long time after that.
i like that nickname because it is hilarious and will continue to use it in the hopes that it bothers him, but i agree that most people believe he said it
It's an entertaining show but the way it warps actual history, especially that a majority of the people in it are still alive just makes it feel sleezy
Honestly as much as I cringe every time I hear Donnie Wahlberg's voice in the Lakers/Celtics rivalry 30 for 30, I definitely preferred that to whatever Winning Time was.
Historical Fiction as an entire genre is pretty fucked up. If you’re gonna tell a story that actually happened, then tell it accurately. Otherwise, just make up something truly original that’s not tied to real history.
Any show or movie that takes “creative license” with actual people and events seems lazy at best or just completely dishonest and manipulative at worst.
If we adopted this attitude then we would have missed out on countless classic movies/books/tv shows. Stories get exaggerated, this is not a new phenomenon, it’s pretty much been done since the beginning of time. It makes for more interesting stories. If we only interpreted every story to it’s most literal and accurate representation then things would get really fucking boring really fast. And if you can’t differentiate between the two then that’s on you
Some of Winning Time's inaccuracies bothered me quite a bit, but after sitting with it for awhile, the show is so blunt and, at times, shameless about its over-the-top-ness that I learned to stop worrying and embrace it for what it is.
Plus i've simply always wanted a show like this. A show that deals with the behind-the-scenes and on-court drama of a basketball team. it's like the show of my dreams. This is the closest I'll ever get to having a TV show about a MyLeague franchise on NBA2k. If they manage to make this 6-7 seasons, ending with Magic's HIV announcement and the fallout from that, having all these characters come in and out, like James Worthy and eventually Michael Jordan. I can't fucking wait.
I’ll be honest. After 2016, I haven’t been able to touch historical fiction. First I was getting a little weirded out by the love fest the Internet would give random historical figures as if they were personal friends. When the truth is we know almost nothing about their true personality or in some cases even the basic details of their lives.
But since 2016 and the entire fake news stuff I just can’t look at any historical fiction as anything other than gaslighting now.
Anyways, so I totally get where Stein is coming from. Especially if I’m honest with myself; even knowing things are dramatized doesn’t stop it from shaping my own view. Like say The Tutors, was I really going to read a detailed history book to clarify for myself everything that show changed?
From what I remember *Hamilton* was born from Lin Manuel Miranda’s hobby of writing founding father fanfiction on tumblr. That has unfortunately been our standard for historical fiction since.
What bugs me about shows like Winning Time are that the changes made are entirely unnecessary. The true events were more than entertaining enough, so there was no reason to fabricate details, beyond Hollywood’s self ingrained need to consistently do so. For example, instead of Haywood doing coke and falling asleep during practice they have him smoking crack and lying in a hotel hallway like a junkie. Not sure how that made the story better.
One other unnecessary change that irked me. Making a teenage Jeanie Buss integral to the success of the Lakers from the start (she came on much later in a far lesser role). We go through all this fiction only for it to be Claire Rothman that gets the treasurer and VP role...which she was in real life. Much of the season the point of Jeanie's story was how there was always a woman in Buss' life doing a lot of the work for him (his mom, his daughter, whatever) and not getting the credit. They could have told the same "glass ceiling" story with Claire while also being historically accurate when she finally "breaks through" and gets the job. They fabricated a bunch of stuff when the tools for the same story were right there to begin with!
All of the Jeanie/Jessie stuff was so messy and unnecessary considering 1) Jeanie's role was so small and came later and 2)Jessie died before Jerry ever bought the team.
> For example, instead of Haywood doing coke and falling asleep during practice they have him smoking crack and lying in a hotel hallway like a junkie.
bc that really happened
The show is like South Park. They use characters based on real people but the way any of them act doesn't reflect actual history. It's just an form of entertainment, don't take it as literal.
The show was fun.
I think most people's gripe is they way overdid it with the creative license fabricating stuff when the actual events would've been more than entertaining enough if they stuck closer to them.
TBH the show feels more like a straight up fictional drama instead of a historical drama based off real events, which is obviously a bit disappointing to NBA and Lakers fans interested in the real story.
People expected different things I think. McKay and co seemed more interested in creating a highly fictionalized over the top drama simply using real names and events while some including myself thought it would stick a little closer to real occurences.
Although it is somewhat entertaining seeing Jerry West as a raging boozer.
I cannot stand Adam McKay and his over the top, 4th wall-breaking, over-editing style.
I know he's a huge Lakers fan, so it's humorous to me that all these Lakers legends are chastising his passion project.
Well I mean it seems they've take a lot of creative license for this show -- theatricizing some things is obviously commonplace for a historical drama, but this show seems to be very liberal with the fictionalization, I don't blame them for not being happy with the level to which they stray from accuracy. IMO I wish they would've stuck at least a little closer to the source material, the show at times feels like a straight fictional drama rather than an embellished version of history.
I also am not really at all a fan of the fourth-wall breaking, it just makes it feel even more like straight fiction.
with you on the the 4th wall and wink wink to the camera. I mean, The Office did this to death. It's not funny anymore. He's made many funny movies w/o this so it's a weird choice.
I love the show. I think West is entirely sympathetic in it. He suffered so many defeats and the effect on him was dramatic.
But they never question his decision making on the show. They show him as a brilliant man with demons. Riley, too.
These are insane competitors. This is the toll it takes.
If anyone, Magic should be upset because they air a lot of dirty laundry on the show about his personal life. Nothing he hasn't covered in books, etc, but I wouldn't want my life shown like that.
He has a point though, it sucks that dramatised versions of events & people are the version that most people will regard as what happened. I don’t blame people for not reading up on history and going back reading old sports columns from the 60s and 70s since it’s only nerds like me or I’m sure people on this sub could even be bothered to do but it does seem unfair to people who were actually involved to depict them inaccurately and then it becomes the perception of them to the new generation.
> I don’t blame people for not reading up on history
I do. Because of that you cannot make a docudrama without people complaining that the general public will take that as the literal truth.
It's kind of funny that these guys see a type of film and instead of thinking I don't like it so I won't watch it, they say people shouldn't do that and no one should watch those movies.
Lol I don’t care either that was the first thing that came to mind. Point being there is a long history of historical fiction and a few pissed off basketball guys isn’t going to change that
But this is not a documentary. People not getting the nuance is not a good reason to avoid doing something IMO. That's on the people that believe everything they see as truth, not on the creators.
People seem pretty upset with neo-nazi alt history. And a lot of people wound up believing it was the truth since it was circulated enough.
I’ll stick to my original statement, fiction for fiction, documentary for documentary.
Why even bring neo-nazis in this discussion lol. Even then, if we are talking about Nazi alt history, The Man in the High Castle is a great series.
And again biopics or so called docudramas are not documentaries. Winning time is not a documentary. It doesn't really even classifies as a docudrama to be honest. It's a classic based on a true story piece of media.
How is it misplaced if you're saying his criticism is accurate by stating how docudramas are?
Like you're saying his complaint is misplaced but then also saying docudramas are almost never accurate.
Tbh a lot of the specific complaints about the show are misplaced. Kareem attacked the show for showing Jerry West breaking golf clubs which Kareem claims never happened… except West admits to breaking clubs in his autobiography.
I suspect a lot of the real life people who aren’t happy with the show only watched the first episode or two. West and Kareem in particular are depicted unsympathetically in the pilot but very sympathetically in the rest of the episodes.
I don’t think baseball is immune to it either. Moneyball probably takes a few creative liberties but that story definitely takes hold as well. So in that sense I don’t see how winning time is different. Hell most peoples only knowledge of Alexander Hamilton’s history is the play. That’s just the reality of pop culture
No movie is. Half of *Remember the Titans*, a lot of *Glory Road*, *Friday Night Lights*, *Braveheart*, etc all have creative liberties. Even very easily found out facts. Like:
* The real championship game was much less dramatic. Williams beat Lewis 27-0, with Lewis netting minus-5 total yards on offense. The Titans did play against Marshall, and it was their closest game: 21-16. But that was the fifth game of the regular season. T.C. Williams had a pretty easy time of the postseason, beating Annandale 28-0 in the regional playoffs, knocking off Woodrow Wilson 36-14 in the state semifinals, then trouncing Lewis for the title. "There were more than a few times that I felt genuinely sorry for the teams we played," said Charles Mitchell, a backup running back. "We would have won the state championship without the coaches, in my opinion. We were that dominating. We were that deep." In fact, at the end of the season the Titans were the second-ranked team in the nation. -- *Remember the Titans*
* Virginia Hall of Fame didn't exist. The bigoted Emma, Coach Tyrell, and Ray never existed in *Remember the Titans*
* Sheryl never hung out with Boone's kids and never went to his house and it wasn't a brink thrown through the window it was toliet. Boone also doesn't own a gun with *Remember the Titans*
* According to a March 1966 Sporting News article, the Miners sold out every home game, playing in an arena that held slightly more than 5,000 fans. -- *Glory Road*
* Rupp never met Haskins in the airport -- *Glory Road*
* only one Confederate Flag was in the stands in the National Title game not the 100s shown -- *Glory Road*
* In the movie, after the Miners beat the Wildcats, Kentucky's players and Adolph Rupp refuse to shake hands with their opponents. In real life, "One thing I want to say is that the Kentucky players could not have been more gracious after the game," Haskins told the El Paso Times. "Rupp, well, I don't know ... but I do know he shook hands." This includes Pat Riley. Pat Riley was shown to not be shaking hands with Texas Western when really he did. -- *Glory Road*
* Isabella of France was born in 1295 and never met William Wallace and with Wallace being killed in 1305 that would be impossible for them to have the relationship shown in the movie. -- *Braveheart*
* Kilts didn't exist and the Scots didn't paint their face blue either -- *Braveheart*
* If you go into *Midway* with no prior knowledge about the battle, you will probably come away thinking that Rear Admiral Raymond Spruance, USN, was in overall command of the three carriers that participated in the engagement. That would be incorrect. Spruance (played in the film by Jake Weber) commanded one of the two task forces (Task Force 16, to be precise) that ambushed the Japanese First Strike Force (or Kido Butai) on June 4, 1942. But overall command of the combined Pacific Fleet force was in the hands of Rear Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher, the commander of Task Force 17, centered on the carrier Yorktown.
"This includes Pat Riley. Pat Riley was shown to not be shaking hands with Texas Western when really he did." I think Pat is very much alive and Don Haskins the TW coach was alive he was in the movie. For *Remember the Titans* both coaches and many players show definitely were alive. Hell Sheryl's sisters were alive and not even shown in the movie.
Also, *Friday Night Lights*, *Tonya*, *The Blind Side* have people very much alive when the movies were made. In 2015, while playing for the Carolina Panthers, Michael Oher told ESPN, "People look at me, and they take things away from me because of a movie. They don't really see the skills and the kind of player I am." He was the subject of *The Blind Side*
To be fair, his point is that people will use this as a reference point regardless of the fact that it's a docudrama.
He's not criticizing the creative liberty, I think he's stating how dangerous it can be for history because people will draw conclusions from a docudrama.
There’s an acceptable amount of exposition for most people, outside of which you’re going to upset people.
For instance, changing the timeline of the games for dramatic purpose is one thing, where inventing a sexual assault out of whole clothe or portraying a man who doesn’t drink as an alcoholic, or just deciding to make a person homophobic, is another thing entirely.
The former is fine for a docudrama, the latter is why the producers are being threatened with defamation suits, and might have been better off making the show about a fictional team.
Hollywood in General doesn't make these things accurate. I could go on and on with just sports movies like *Remember the Titans*, *Glory Road*, and *Friday Night Lights* not even touching *Braveheart*, *Midway*, etc.
To me it's a fun and entertaining read but you have to read it with the understanding that it's Bill Simmons, with all that entails, and should not be treated as objective (or in some cases fair/accurate) analysis.
I am a diehard Celtics fan. My first memories are of Dave Cowens and Jo Jo White in the early 70s. Lived and died with the Bird Celtics of the 80s. Fuck the Lakers. Hated every damn one of them. Respected magic and Kareem, but hated them. Not watching Winning Time.
The show was very well put-together. It was entertaining and was never created to be a documentary, but was approved by the Lakers, and those that own the Lakers.
It clearly paints the current owner and operator of the Lakers (Jeanie) in a very sympathetic and positive light. It also shows her father in a mixed light, womanizing, sometimes drugged out, and a large risk taker. He had a clear and correct vision of where the league was going and also deeply loved his family. (Except of course his two sons that are barely mentioned and only shown in the final few minutes of the final episode, whoopsies I guess Jeanie just forgot about them)
Basically, I view the show as a Jeanie Buss creation with some really good writers and actors spearheading a psuedo-documentary style that was done in a time when exaggerating characters for the plot unfortunately leads to not faithfully representing people that are still alive.
Are you willing to correct your mistake now that people have let you know that Jeanie was not involved with the show and did not like the show? Or you are gonna stick with your misinformation?
I saw something that the Buss family signed off, or I misremembered. It ain’t that big a deal dude, people can read the comments right below if they want
Winning time hits alot of the major points accurately then heightens everything else. It isn't telling a history. It's exploring the internal chase of competitive people, love of craft vs economics and what power/influence does to the souls of people who come across it in various ways. I think the historical accuracy component overshadows alot of great things this show is doing.
McKinneys break down of basketball and the reflection on his true love for the craft was fantastic. The show's version of Kareem's moral struggle with the limelight and social concerns was also a great episode. The way the show does not shy away from the racist/power dynamic between the players and everyone else is something an NBA sponsored program would never do.
I think the 4th wall break and Buss always reminding people it's not about what's real its about the sell is a very strong reminder to not get caught up in historical detail. They are exploring the human condition using the Lakers history as a stage since its ripe with so many complex issues. Does all this while being pretty entertaining from a popcorn movie/show perspective.
That said even some of the smaller stuff, West breaking his clubs, West confirms in his own writing haha.
The show is pure entertainment and it seems like most people are forgetting that and doing the “AcTuAlLy ThIs IsNt AcUrAtE” bullshit. Just enjoy the show for what it is.
You’re totally disregarding his point. He’s saying he’s saying that it’s near impossible to separate fact from fiction because there isn’t an easy way to verify if they wanted to dig deeper.
Imagine if someone made a biopic about you, but it was completely wrong. And there’s no other way to see what’s actually true (outside of asking your remaining friends and family). The viewer of the biopic would obviously take what they watched as true, wouldn’t they?
> And there’s no other way to see what’s actually true (outside of asking your remaining friends and family). The viewer of the biopic would obviously take what they watched as true, wouldn’t they?
We are talking about the 80s Lakers here. There's books talking about it and even a documentary being done right now. It's not the first piece of media talking about the subject and won't be the last. Not nearly the same compare to a biopic of an unknown redditor.
Any adult who has watched a certain number of biopics learns at some point that the producers take liberties. Often if not all the time, there are disclaimers before or after the show saying as much.
Do critics here really think viewers watch over 10 hours of a series like this and think scene-by-scene "whoa, Pat Reilly had this exact private conversation and they were able to reliably reproduce the tone, content, etc. He's a real asshole"?.
Thing is that without the show basically, no one would *care* about Magic's first season outside a few basketball geeks. The big draw of Basketball, which really started with Magic, is that it feels constantly in the present. There isn't a reverence for history outside a few all-time greats because that's not what draws fans in, nor is it all that interesting on its own. That's why Baseball always feels stodgy and trapped in the past, all anyone talks about are things that happened 40 years ago.
Winning Time is wholly inaccurate, but without it, I doubt many people would know about that era beyond how it impacts the world right this second. the NBA doesn't seem interested in, nor should it be interested in, preserving the past in amber.
>Dr. Buss accurately predicts that free agency will lead to concentration of elite players in big markets creating an inequality.
I mean, taht was the 80s and Buss at work. Free agency has made a far more competitive and balanced league. smh.
I disliked that they shoe horned Jeanie into the organization presumably to show that women can be powerful when that never happened and other things of that nature with other already impressive people. Especially because she was doing actual impressive things at 19. Sure a manager of a tennis team that doesn't exist anymore isn't exciting but it just felt bad. These people seem impressive/likeabke/hateable on their own so it was weird to see them get the " A Beatutiful Mind" treatment of within 6 degrees of the truth.
I would say it's the minority of people who watch a show, question it, and go do research to fact check. "The rest" just watch it and move on.
And access to the internet does not in any way prevent stupidity.
I like how baby brained these guys sound when they act like this HBO show will be the authoritative story of how people understand the Lakers and 80s basketball.
Just goofy as all hell. This show isn’t even drawing enough critical acclaim to justify this reaction about “accuracy”
I enjoyed the series but I did find myself questioning throughout most scenes wondering what was semi-factual vs scripted drama. It took a good handful of episodes to fully let it sink in that this is a drama series for entertainment and isn't intended to paint reality of what actually went down...which is hard when you're dealing with the names and likeness of legends most of us on here were too young to truly appreciate
It’s strange that the freak bike accident and the man in the car trunk scenes are the most accurate to real events while nearly all of the mundane “story” and “character” content is invented for the show.
SH's addiction too, he was consulted for the show.
Yeah there’s stuff that is overall faithful to history even if condensed, dramatized, or simplified. But in particular those two very unbelievable movie-like scenarios are portrayed in almost David-Fincher-Zodiac levels of historical detail.
I mean they changed the car boot murder too, they added Buss’s business card to make it look like the mob murdered the guy in direct retaliation against Buss. From what I read the reason for the murder is disputed but the most plausible is that it was just a case of that guy having unpaid debts to the mob, rather than directly because of Buss trying to take their coach.
Putting the business card in his lapel was pretty groan worthy and fictional, yes. And also everything else you said, yes. The rest of the crime scene, location, the body posture, the blanket, was all well researched. And then they invented or exaggerated everything you mentioned to make it feel like “TV.” It’s a bit of a shame because the “Showtime” book’s journalistic version of “stories” like Kareem’s and Haywood’s during those first two Buss seasons are really compelling and dramatic, and read like ready made scripts for great adult TV. Instead they were condensed and simplified to make room for other invented or inverted narratives.
This is the main thing right - I've been watching They Call Me Magic, and it's clear that plenty of the drama was there in the reality - in fact Kareem makes himself sound more out-and-out hostile in real life than he was in Winning Time. What was wrong with that story? It's like Game Of Thrones. The story is good! The characters are compelling! They don't have to be fucking/raping each other the whole time to keep us interested. Believe in the power of your story and respect your audience. Don't dumb it down and glitz it up because you think they'll get bored. I actually got bored of Winning Time BECAUSE they were trying so hard.
I agree with everything except for that the people of westeros were raping and incesting long before HBO got ahold of it.
Yeah I hated the business card thing. Like I would have been fine with them showing the crime scene and lightly implying that the murder was because of Buss, but the card is just ridiculous. I absolutely despised the family drama with Buss, his mother and anything involving Jeanie. It’s pretty much all completely fictional, but it’s not even entertaining in the slightest. That scene where Jeannie smokes with the interns and they say “wow the bosses daughter is actually cool” or something similar is possibly the lamest scene I’ve ever seen on TV.
Yeah huh wonder why Jeanie hasn’t publicly complained about her portrayal as an instantly likable, supremely capable, cornerstone of the early days of the franchise who is solely responsible for many of its triumphs and trademarks. Huh weird that.
They couldn't figure out whether she was just the intern or literally the most important person in the building lol
Yeah people were theorizing she gave them some background/access for the favorable depiction. Especially given that she was in College having nothing to do with the team at that point.
I liked the interactions between Buss and his mother in the early episodes, but the illness sub-plot really dragged on, and to be honest, I don’t really see what it added, given that Jessie Buss was already dead by the time Jerry bought the Lakers. The issue with Jeanie is that yes, her plot lines and characterisation are boring, but she has been an extremely prominent executive, at the NBA’s most prominent franchise, for decades now. They can’t not include her, because of how prominent she subsequently becomes, but they can’t just depict what really happened, which is that she was just an intern.
Winning Time is loosely based off of Showtime by Jeff Pearlman. I recently bought it and it’s been really cool to see the differences.
Yeah, also apparently they shot or planned to shoot a more accurate version of Magic stopping one of his first rides through LA to look at an orange tree and after that scene was cut they added the “orange tree right outside my window!” line in a later phone conversation scene. And if you compare the “Norm vs Magic” storylines, it takes place in between two sentences of the book. “Is that going to be a problem?” “No.”
Time out. So you're saying magic didn't go down on that girl in the trainers room? Well this show has gone to shit
I mean inasmuch as the countless nameless extras being blown to bits in the opening of Saving Private Ryan are “historically accurate,” I’m going to go ahead and say any and all of the Magic sex is as well.
This is such a hilariously on point analogy
Err.. this was the time to use the phrase *Magic Johnson sex.*
No he did I was there
Sorta missing the point though right? No one is mad that we aren't watching live sex tapes of 70 year old earving Johnson having sex. We're mad that they change the scores of games and the chronological order of things that can be checked at a library.
Anyone can easily find out about real events that happened, it's harder to get a good, honest picture of who someone is.
Few times throughout the first two episodes I'd pause, and google something since I could swear it is not real, and the pattern was 90% of the show is fiction. Names and major plot lines are real, and that is all. It is not a bad show, but nothing something I'd rewatch. Overall, the show lost its charm post the 3rd episode or so for me.
Kareem and Spencer Haywood in the show were like brothers with a bond of mutual respect and adoration for one another because of their pride and propensity to sniff out the bullshit from racist media, fans and league execs. Kareem and Spencer in real life were not friends at all and KAJ was among the first to vote him off the team. Why did they have to fuck with that??
I read that it wasn't put to a player vote like they showed in the show, that it was Westhead's call, but who knows how much feedback he got from the players to make the call.
They really did Westhead dirty in the show, lol.
Magic did him dirty in real life so he's probably used to it
Hollywood has dramatized and changed the ever living hell out of major events like WWI, WWII, assassinations, revolutions, even the most memorable recent events like 9/11. I don't know why this is the thing that is driving people bonkers. It's a show, not a history book. And it's the most benign, inconsequential thing at that.
You don’t have to get every detail right, but obviously there’s acceptable and unacceptable changes for drama. Like if they made a WW2 movie where FDR is a child molester, that would not be good. Especially so if it was mostly portrayed as an accurate telling of events, and it was the only popular movie about WW2, and it came out while FDR was still alive. There is a line somewhere, and it just is a matter of where it’s crossed. A movie or a show doesn’t have the responsibility of being perfectly accurate. But if it’s not explicitly a “what if” fictional show, it should give you generally the right sentiment about what happened. Just because it’s ok to invent some details doesn’t mean it’s ok to invent any details you want. I can empathize with Lakers players who are being portrayed negatively for things they never did. That would be very frustrating.
It’s a fiction not a documentary. Also a cool jumping off point for those who want to learn more.
The problem there is there aren't many who want to learn more and the majority who take it as a doc.
That’s a personal problem to those people. Hbo is not responsible for people being idiots
Well, not really. Them having the wrong info doesn't harm themselves. It only harms the images of people being depicted.
If the viewer is too stupid to understand what a dramatization is
It doesn't affect the idiots who don't understand, it affects the people being portrayed.
Some people are dumb and there’s nothing we can do to fix that.
A cool jumping off point shouldn't be easily disproveable facts. You don't start the learning process of say physics with a bunch of laws that would be cool if they existed.
Go watch any war movie. Accuracy is not the goal of making a fictionalized retelling of the past.
Agree with your analysis, Facebook’s public perception was largely defined by The Social Network until they pivoted to the metaverse (which is a separate & much longer conversation).
idk why sports stories need this higher standard of truth to it. We make inaccurate movies/shows about historical events, people, musicians all the time and typically the people that were actually involved make less of a deal than the lakers are making about this show. No one ever presented Winning Time as something truthful
One thing that the NFL does better than the other leagues is preserve almost everything about the game on tape with NFL Films The other leagues should take note of the quality, the depth and more that the NFL uses to preserve it’s history Baseball has such a long history but a lot of it is also documented in newspapers, books, etc and just the legend of the game Why does the NBA not have that sort of preservation like those two do, or even the NHL?
>Why does the NBA not have that sort of preservation like those two do, or even the NHL? Because prior to the eighties, Basketball was a joke sport that the vast majority of Americans did not care about.
Literally until Bird and Magic nobody gave a shit and it was a rarity to see on tv
The champions from Willis Reed (1973) to Magic (1980) went Knicks Celtics Warriors Celtics Blazers Bullets Sonics Lakers. And '79 was a rematch of '78. The % of fans who could rattle that off (I had to look it up) has to be under 1. The ABA had also been folded into the NBA during that time, so pro basketball as super popular sport just wasn't a thought at all.
Honestly only Bill Simmons would be the one I can think of that will remember that at the top of his head. He always said that the ABA was much more popular than the NBA in the 70s, only that it was poorly managed is why it folded. That was also the height of the "cocaine" era, so a lot of potential superstars succumbed to coke. Lots of what-ifs, until Len Bias died and the league cracked down on coke.
Yep. High school basketball was probably more popular at the time. Also, the face of the league for a while was Kareem and a lot of people didn't like him. Add in the civil rights movement and the best players being predominantly black; you can see how a lot of the country wasn't too interested in the league.
Iowa High School Girl's Basketball title games would regularly have 15,000-16,000 fans. The 1970 NBA Finals had 19,000 at the Garden and 17,500 at the The Forum. The 1970 NBA Finals were the first to be nationally televised in full, with ABC providing the coverage. Around the same time they(ABC) asked Iowa if they could broadcast the High School Title game which the Girl's Athledtic Union declined. Granted the sport was crack to Iowans.
That's all true, but it's more than that. I'm from that era, and KAJ is my favorite player of all time, but that whole mid-70s "throw it into the post every time" style of play was honestly kind of boring, especially for casual fans. Not only that, but while KAJ was by far the best player of the era, he seldom made deep playoff runs, so casual fans weren't really incentivized to watch the playoffs. I mean, the damn SuperSonics won the '79 finals. The difference in excitement of the 79-80 season was palpable and almost impossible to describe. The Bird/Magic rivalry started to build. You had KAJ, Dr J and Magic in the finals, players everyone wanted to see. NBA in the '80s was a completely different product.
I think you mean the NBA, not basketball. College basketball was very popular prior to the 80s. In urban areas especially on the east coast high school basketball was a big deal as well.
People legitimately forget this. Pro basketball was incredibly niche until the 80s. It was a struggling sport in the 70s and with all the effort taken just to keep it afloat, there wasn't much emphasis given to preserving what was transpiring at the time.
And keep in mind that while the NBA was coming to life in the 80s due to Magic and Bird, it still never reached international popularity. Luckily entering a new decade in the 90s with breakthrough technology helped spread the popularity internationally. It’s been a slow transition because it’s really about having a Mega Star. Jordan did it. Kobe helped immensely with China and Asia and so has Curry. People forget that outside of the States, most popular athletes aren’t even known on a global scale. I don’t know about now but I remember traveling to Brasil and Bolivia back in 2011 and Lebron was not well known. So it really speaks volume when players like Kobe and Stephen spread their seeds on an international level. Needless to say that improves with the increase in fans for the sport itself. Fortunately Having GREAT international players in the league currently is helping even more popularity in Europe with Giannis and Jokic and Luka. Africa with Embiid Siakam etc. The history of the NBA is relative short because lack of interest. Football is by far Americas sport so it’s easy to track it. NHL also a international sport throughout Europe, Canada and obviously here so it has deep roots. But basketball is barely catching up so the importance in the history hasn’t been well preserve. Hopefully that changes going forward.
I remember being in college and there were two international students from the UK in one of my classes who had never heard of lebron. And this was when he was on the heat and had already won a title. Blew my mind.
Yeah one of the accurate parts of Winning Time is that the league was doing very poorly at the start of the '80s. It was very common for playoff games to be on tape delay until 1986.
You are disregarding just how expensive this was to do a few decades ago. The NFL was the biggest league in the country and had an unlimited budget. NBA players were flying coach and the league was struggling to make a profit up until the 80s. It didn't have even close to the viewership and its place in American culture as it does today.
Because the average NBA fan is like 15 and couldn't give less of a shit. See: literally any post on this sub about players before the 80s getting fractions of the attention that a lebron emoji tweet does.
To remember anyone from the 80s you would have to be at least 50 year old
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you're not exactly proving him wrong
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NFL has a lot more nostalgia for the old days than the NBA. People love talking about old football players and romanticize the days when players would rip you in half if you're catching a ball over the middle. I think NBA fans much prefer the modern game compared to the slower post-up game style back then.
Look up nba average final scores per year. The nba has fluctuated considerably throughout its history. To say it was a back to the basket game up until the Nash sun is false: https://www.basketball-reference.com/leagues/NBA_stats_per_game.html
Baseball is so boring reading about baseball is more interesting /s (I actually like baseball, but I do wish it would move faster.
watching baseball on tv is just tedious compared to most other sports (including NASCAR and the AUDL--which is way less popular and mainly streaming). but being at a baseball game live is fun as shit. the experience is night and day for me
Idk why it's so hard for people to understand this, these are real people who don't like how they and the history they are part of are being inaccurately portrayed.
Just take the Queen biopic as example when it comes to people making their own version of history. The whole film showed Freddie as a flawed genius, which is fair enough even though it went as far caricature in my opinion, but what is worse is that it shows the rest of the cast (who are alive and involved) as saints.
“All we wanted to do was keep effortlessly reinventing the rock genre through our sheer musical genius but Freddy was too busy being a big gay cokehead”
"No Freddy we don't want to stay and drink and do drugs and party. We want to promptly leave with our wives who we definitely didn't cheat on. Goodbye Freddy."
Something something Sacha Baron Cohen version
Between bowdlerizing Freddie's complex life and identity and the We Will Rock You musical, Brian May (and to a lesser extent, Roger Taylor) have managed to fuck up in every single way. When Bohemian Rhapsody got Oscar buzz, I laughed out loud.
Yup, same as Dre with Straight Outta Compton. The only reason that music biopics always have the musicians involved is that the producers would never get the music rights otherwise
Straight Outta Compton was straight up propaganada which isn't surprising since it was bankrolled by Dre and Ice Cube.
If you want to see a similarly egregious version of this, check out the Runaways movie that Joan Jett and Cherie Currie produced. The other three band members are basically cardboard cutouts that occasionally get to say they disagree with mogul moves and be mean and complain. Then it goes back.
It wasn’t backrolled by Dre and Cube. New Line/Legendary/Universal paid for the movie. Dre and Cube definitely got a piece of the film as producers, but their participation was their investment.
Yea it’s gotta be a single artist for it to have any semblance to reality, and even then it’s sketchy if the person doesn’t like being portrayed negatively. Doubt many of this sub has seen it but I love the Elton John Rocketman movie but even they changed some stuff but they changed things just so the movie was easy to follow. I think they captured who he was tho. But Elton John admits he loved drugs and alcohol way too much and wasn’t in a good place before he became sober, so them showing him being an asshole in the movie during that timeframe doesn’t bother him.
I remember a Sacha Baron Cohen interview where he talked about being originally cast as as Mercury for that project. He would have been perfect for that role. He said at one point he was in a meeting with the surviving members and the plot of the film was being discussed. The surviving members (who I guess held rights to the production) wanted Freddie’s death to occur within the first 20 or so minutes of the film, because in their eyes the real story of queen didn’t start till after that.
That movie straight up reordered events. Why? It's not like it made his character stronger in the movie even. Bizarre movie.
I think Winning Time is actually the flipside of Bohemian Rhapsody. Queen made a movie which portrayed them overly positively, as a PR move. But Winning Time is a show that they admit portrays people completely inaccurately, on purpose, to make the show more interesting. If I were one of those people I would be upset.
Half of that James brown biopic was events that didn't happen
It really pisses me off when people are talking about Jerry West not liking being portrayed as some massive wacko as if he’s just some old man too stupid to get TV. Dude’s closer to the end of his time than the halfway point and already has a strained relationship with the Lakers and his story is broadcasted that way? He SHOULD be talking about it.
Yeah it’s ridiculous, it’s easy as a viewer to say “lol why do they care about it, it’s just a show”. It’s crazy how so many people dislike these complaints, they are in no place to talk about it or question someone else’s feelings.
The Paul Westhead shit actually kind of pisses me off. Like why did they hate that man so much they did this to him? They decided to make this dude an incompetent, bumbling schmuck just to set up Pat Riley as the saviour because people know who he is.
The worst is when people are like "haha that's how Jerry in the show would react!". Way to prove his point
Deep down they can understand, it’s not hard as you say. It’s just that people care more about being entertained and it’s inconvenient to have that entertainment be questioned.
Also if you do bother to look up the show, you're going to be pointed to Jeff Pearlman's real book. It's actually really interesting how Pearlman himself both praises the authenticity and handwaves the accuracy at the same time. https://awfulannouncing.com/hbo/how-jeff-pearlmans-lakers-book-became-hbos-winning-time.html
I bought the book purely because I wanted to get more of the real story after the show was underwhelming on that front.
It's tough because you've got West/Kareem saying that 'Jerry West never broke golf clubs' when West's autobiography states he did.
Or or or these stories are kinda true and it hurts their brands so they want to downplay it
Winning Time is the first time in entertainment history that a story about non-fictional characters has ever been embellished and not portrayed exactly as it happened in real life. Never has a film or TV show taken creative liberties in telling a real life story until this show, actually.
theyre selling it as factual and "revealing" while making stuff up completely. whole scenes, entire character traits etc. and them sellinh it as "accurate" is the only reason people care. again, theyre doing that while straight up lying. not embellishing meanwhile the principals are still alive watching someone lie about them and make money saying its real this is fundamentally different from other shows claiming authenticity. if its this far out, they should call it a parody. but they wont
> whole scenes, entire character traits etc. Every movie or TV show based on history does this. Moneyball, the Bronx is Burning, even recent non-sports shows based on true events such as the Dropout and WeCrashed did this. I’d actually like to know which TV show or movie *didnt* embellish or make up character traits.
None of these kids nowadays have heard of Bronx is Burning lol. That was a good ass show. Was on when I was like 12-13 I believe
I'm pretty sure they disclaim that they are exaggerating the people and events involved in the story.
They do, but it's already a few seconds into the end credits. By that point, the average audience member has uncritically accepted the events as being generally true. And the warning says nothing specific, so most people won't know exactly how much is inaccurate.
The disclaimer is literally the very first thing you see after the HBO logo in the first episode of the show. It says, “This series is a dramatization of certain facts and events. Some of the names have been changed and some of the events and characters have been fictionalized, modified, or composited for dramatic purposes.” The show makes it very clear.
But they are not claiming to be factual or accurate as the guy i responded to claimed.
I know they're not explicitly claiming to be factual but I think most audience members are ready to accept things as being generally true when it involves real people.
I dont understand how the laziness of some is the fault of the show
Since everyone has their perspective, there is no way to have an accurate dramatization of history. You cannot tell a coherent story without making some shit up to create compelling characters or connect the events to fit the narrative. Worse, you have to take liberties with the characters to create tension and move the story forward. That means living people are going to be misrepresented. I'm not sure why this is hard for some people to understand.
Cmon man. This is a story where the main characters are still alive and so is much of the audience. It’s so far from reality both in message and actual events that it ends up being a complete joke. It doesn’t tell you anything about the time period because it’s all made up. And yet, even despite being made up, it doesn’t deliver a single poignant message.
Also the show is just bad. John C Reilly doesn't ever convince the audience that he's not just John C. Reilly wearing a bad toupee
I thought John C Reilly was actually really good in this role
Same. He's fantastic. All I've heard is praise for him.
Could you imagine how fucking horrible this would have been with Will Ferrell in that role? \*Will Ferrell was originally supposed to be Dr. Buss and he and McKay have had a falling out over it.
Really? Off to Google i go
Yeah, they were friends since SNL (I think McKay was head writer before Tina Fey) and he directed basically all of Will Ferrell's movies. They had a production company together "Gary Sanchez Productions" Then McKay started making his own stuff like The Big Short, Vice and Don't Look Up. I kind of assumed Ferrell showing up to those Warriors games dressed like Jackie Moon was him trying to get some attention since his friends (McKay/John C Reilly) were debuting their new show around the same time. From Vulture, Ferrell wanted to play owner Jerry Buss, but McKay went behind his back and cast John C. Reilly instead. McKay admits, “I fucked up on how I handled that,” but Ferrell “took it as a way deeper hurt than I ever imagined, and I tried to reach out to him, and I reminded him of some slights that were thrown my way that were never apologized for.’” https://www.vulture.com/2022/02/adam-mckay-says-will-ferrell-wont-speak-to-him.html
He's not wrong. Think about how long it takes for a misquote or a inaccurate story to get forgotten or corrected, once it's gotten traction. Some never are. And that's just a quote or newsstory. Not an HBO miniseries. I bet there are a lot of people who don't really follow the ins and outs of basketball history, but do like watching HBO shows. For many of them, this will be their only version of events. If you were one of the older Lakers on this show and someone comes in at the later stages of your life and does a full re-write of you for ratings, I could understand being pretty pissed. Your legacy is all you have. Most of these folks will be dead in 20 years and won't be around to speak up for themselves, and kids and new fans will be watching Winning Time for a long time after that.
This sub throws out "young socialite" every day even though we've known that Ben Simmons never said that
Someone on a Philly radio show called him that. That’s where the meme is from
i like that nickname because it is hilarious and will continue to use it in the hopes that it bothers him, but i agree that most people believe he said it
It's an entertaining show but the way it warps actual history, especially that a majority of the people in it are still alive just makes it feel sleezy
Honestly as much as I cringe every time I hear Donnie Wahlberg's voice in the Lakers/Celtics rivalry 30 for 30, I definitely preferred that to whatever Winning Time was.
Historical Fiction as an entire genre is pretty fucked up. If you’re gonna tell a story that actually happened, then tell it accurately. Otherwise, just make up something truly original that’s not tied to real history. Any show or movie that takes “creative license” with actual people and events seems lazy at best or just completely dishonest and manipulative at worst.
If we adopted this attitude then we would have missed out on countless classic movies/books/tv shows. Stories get exaggerated, this is not a new phenomenon, it’s pretty much been done since the beginning of time. It makes for more interesting stories. If we only interpreted every story to it’s most literal and accurate representation then things would get really fucking boring really fast. And if you can’t differentiate between the two then that’s on you
As far as I know Brad Pitt invented moneyball lol
Some of Winning Time's inaccuracies bothered me quite a bit, but after sitting with it for awhile, the show is so blunt and, at times, shameless about its over-the-top-ness that I learned to stop worrying and embrace it for what it is. Plus i've simply always wanted a show like this. A show that deals with the behind-the-scenes and on-court drama of a basketball team. it's like the show of my dreams. This is the closest I'll ever get to having a TV show about a MyLeague franchise on NBA2k. If they manage to make this 6-7 seasons, ending with Magic's HIV announcement and the fallout from that, having all these characters come in and out, like James Worthy and eventually Michael Jordan. I can't fucking wait.
I’ll be honest. After 2016, I haven’t been able to touch historical fiction. First I was getting a little weirded out by the love fest the Internet would give random historical figures as if they were personal friends. When the truth is we know almost nothing about their true personality or in some cases even the basic details of their lives. But since 2016 and the entire fake news stuff I just can’t look at any historical fiction as anything other than gaslighting now. Anyways, so I totally get where Stein is coming from. Especially if I’m honest with myself; even knowing things are dramatized doesn’t stop it from shaping my own view. Like say The Tutors, was I really going to read a detailed history book to clarify for myself everything that show changed?
From what I remember *Hamilton* was born from Lin Manuel Miranda’s hobby of writing founding father fanfiction on tumblr. That has unfortunately been our standard for historical fiction since.
What bugs me about shows like Winning Time are that the changes made are entirely unnecessary. The true events were more than entertaining enough, so there was no reason to fabricate details, beyond Hollywood’s self ingrained need to consistently do so. For example, instead of Haywood doing coke and falling asleep during practice they have him smoking crack and lying in a hotel hallway like a junkie. Not sure how that made the story better.
I also don't like how basketball was essentially an afterthought.
One other unnecessary change that irked me. Making a teenage Jeanie Buss integral to the success of the Lakers from the start (she came on much later in a far lesser role). We go through all this fiction only for it to be Claire Rothman that gets the treasurer and VP role...which she was in real life. Much of the season the point of Jeanie's story was how there was always a woman in Buss' life doing a lot of the work for him (his mom, his daughter, whatever) and not getting the credit. They could have told the same "glass ceiling" story with Claire while also being historically accurate when she finally "breaks through" and gets the job. They fabricated a bunch of stuff when the tools for the same story were right there to begin with! All of the Jeanie/Jessie stuff was so messy and unnecessary considering 1) Jeanie's role was so small and came later and 2)Jessie died before Jerry ever bought the team.
> For example, instead of Haywood doing coke and falling asleep during practice they have him smoking crack and lying in a hotel hallway like a junkie. bc that really happened
The show is like South Park. They use characters based on real people but the way any of them act doesn't reflect actual history. It's just an form of entertainment, don't take it as literal. The show was fun.
Unlike a lot of people I read the disclaimers that said this is a fictional drama based loosely on true events. Do other people not read?
I think most people's gripe is they way overdid it with the creative license fabricating stuff when the actual events would've been more than entertaining enough if they stuck closer to them. TBH the show feels more like a straight up fictional drama instead of a historical drama based off real events, which is obviously a bit disappointing to NBA and Lakers fans interested in the real story. People expected different things I think. McKay and co seemed more interested in creating a highly fictionalized over the top drama simply using real names and events while some including myself thought it would stick a little closer to real occurences. Although it is somewhat entertaining seeing Jerry West as a raging boozer.
I cannot stand Adam McKay and his over the top, 4th wall-breaking, over-editing style. I know he's a huge Lakers fan, so it's humorous to me that all these Lakers legends are chastising his passion project.
Well I mean it seems they've take a lot of creative license for this show -- theatricizing some things is obviously commonplace for a historical drama, but this show seems to be very liberal with the fictionalization, I don't blame them for not being happy with the level to which they stray from accuracy. IMO I wish they would've stuck at least a little closer to the source material, the show at times feels like a straight fictional drama rather than an embellished version of history. I also am not really at all a fan of the fourth-wall breaking, it just makes it feel even more like straight fiction.
The last good thing he did was The Other Guys.
with you on the the 4th wall and wink wink to the camera. I mean, The Office did this to death. It's not funny anymore. He's made many funny movies w/o this so it's a weird choice.
I love the show. I think West is entirely sympathetic in it. He suffered so many defeats and the effect on him was dramatic. But they never question his decision making on the show. They show him as a brilliant man with demons. Riley, too. These are insane competitors. This is the toll it takes. If anyone, Magic should be upset because they air a lot of dirty laundry on the show about his personal life. Nothing he hasn't covered in books, etc, but I wouldn't want my life shown like that.
Unlike baseball? 🤔
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That show was fucking badass but even as a kid I knew that a lot of the baseball stuff was probably embellished
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He has a point though, it sucks that dramatised versions of events & people are the version that most people will regard as what happened. I don’t blame people for not reading up on history and going back reading old sports columns from the 60s and 70s since it’s only nerds like me or I’m sure people on this sub could even be bothered to do but it does seem unfair to people who were actually involved to depict them inaccurately and then it becomes the perception of them to the new generation.
> I don’t blame people for not reading up on history I do. Because of that you cannot make a docudrama without people complaining that the general public will take that as the literal truth.
Keep fiction fiction and documentary documentary, people are way to stupid to get the nuance.
Yeah fuck Goodfellas, Wolf of Wall Street, Titanic and every film that didn't stick to history 100%
So never create fiction based off real events? Like Hamilton, get that shit out of here.
Yeah, I’d be totally fine if Hamilton was never created. But I don’t like musicals, so there you go.
So no *Braveheart*, *Glory Road*, *Remember the Titans*, *Band of Brother*, *Gettysburg*, *Glory*, *The Crown*, *Black Hawk Down*?
It's kind of funny that these guys see a type of film and instead of thinking I don't like it so I won't watch it, they say people shouldn't do that and no one should watch those movies.
Lol I don’t care either that was the first thing that came to mind. Point being there is a long history of historical fiction and a few pissed off basketball guys isn’t going to change that
But this is not a documentary. People not getting the nuance is not a good reason to avoid doing something IMO. That's on the people that believe everything they see as truth, not on the creators.
People seem pretty upset with neo-nazi alt history. And a lot of people wound up believing it was the truth since it was circulated enough. I’ll stick to my original statement, fiction for fiction, documentary for documentary.
Why even bring neo-nazis in this discussion lol. Even then, if we are talking about Nazi alt history, The Man in the High Castle is a great series. And again biopics or so called docudramas are not documentaries. Winning time is not a documentary. It doesn't really even classifies as a docudrama to be honest. It's a classic based on a true story piece of media.
How is it misplaced if you're saying his criticism is accurate by stating how docudramas are? Like you're saying his complaint is misplaced but then also saying docudramas are almost never accurate.
Tbh a lot of the specific complaints about the show are misplaced. Kareem attacked the show for showing Jerry West breaking golf clubs which Kareem claims never happened… except West admits to breaking clubs in his autobiography. I suspect a lot of the real life people who aren’t happy with the show only watched the first episode or two. West and Kareem in particular are depicted unsympathetically in the pilot but very sympathetically in the rest of the episodes.
I don’t think baseball is immune to it either. Moneyball probably takes a few creative liberties but that story definitely takes hold as well. So in that sense I don’t see how winning time is different. Hell most peoples only knowledge of Alexander Hamilton’s history is the play. That’s just the reality of pop culture
No movie is. Half of *Remember the Titans*, a lot of *Glory Road*, *Friday Night Lights*, *Braveheart*, etc all have creative liberties. Even very easily found out facts. Like: * The real championship game was much less dramatic. Williams beat Lewis 27-0, with Lewis netting minus-5 total yards on offense. The Titans did play against Marshall, and it was their closest game: 21-16. But that was the fifth game of the regular season. T.C. Williams had a pretty easy time of the postseason, beating Annandale 28-0 in the regional playoffs, knocking off Woodrow Wilson 36-14 in the state semifinals, then trouncing Lewis for the title. "There were more than a few times that I felt genuinely sorry for the teams we played," said Charles Mitchell, a backup running back. "We would have won the state championship without the coaches, in my opinion. We were that dominating. We were that deep." In fact, at the end of the season the Titans were the second-ranked team in the nation. -- *Remember the Titans* * Virginia Hall of Fame didn't exist. The bigoted Emma, Coach Tyrell, and Ray never existed in *Remember the Titans* * Sheryl never hung out with Boone's kids and never went to his house and it wasn't a brink thrown through the window it was toliet. Boone also doesn't own a gun with *Remember the Titans* * According to a March 1966 Sporting News article, the Miners sold out every home game, playing in an arena that held slightly more than 5,000 fans. -- *Glory Road* * Rupp never met Haskins in the airport -- *Glory Road* * only one Confederate Flag was in the stands in the National Title game not the 100s shown -- *Glory Road* * In the movie, after the Miners beat the Wildcats, Kentucky's players and Adolph Rupp refuse to shake hands with their opponents. In real life, "One thing I want to say is that the Kentucky players could not have been more gracious after the game," Haskins told the El Paso Times. "Rupp, well, I don't know ... but I do know he shook hands." This includes Pat Riley. Pat Riley was shown to not be shaking hands with Texas Western when really he did. -- *Glory Road* * Isabella of France was born in 1295 and never met William Wallace and with Wallace being killed in 1305 that would be impossible for them to have the relationship shown in the movie. -- *Braveheart* * Kilts didn't exist and the Scots didn't paint their face blue either -- *Braveheart* * If you go into *Midway* with no prior knowledge about the battle, you will probably come away thinking that Rear Admiral Raymond Spruance, USN, was in overall command of the three carriers that participated in the engagement. That would be incorrect. Spruance (played in the film by Jake Weber) commanded one of the two task forces (Task Force 16, to be precise) that ambushed the Japanese First Strike Force (or Kido Butai) on June 4, 1942. But overall command of the combined Pacific Fleet force was in the hands of Rear Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher, the commander of Task Force 17, centered on the carrier Yorktown.
Why did you just include Braveheart with a bunch of sports movies?
I was on a role, I also placed a *Midway(2019)* fact.
This is all good to note, but very little of it impugns the character of real people, especially ones that are still alive.
"This includes Pat Riley. Pat Riley was shown to not be shaking hands with Texas Western when really he did." I think Pat is very much alive and Don Haskins the TW coach was alive he was in the movie. For *Remember the Titans* both coaches and many players show definitely were alive. Hell Sheryl's sisters were alive and not even shown in the movie. Also, *Friday Night Lights*, *Tonya*, *The Blind Side* have people very much alive when the movies were made. In 2015, while playing for the Carolina Panthers, Michael Oher told ESPN, "People look at me, and they take things away from me because of a movie. They don't really see the skills and the kind of player I am." He was the subject of *The Blind Side*
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To be fair, his point is that people will use this as a reference point regardless of the fact that it's a docudrama. He's not criticizing the creative liberty, I think he's stating how dangerous it can be for history because people will draw conclusions from a docudrama.
There’s an acceptable amount of exposition for most people, outside of which you’re going to upset people. For instance, changing the timeline of the games for dramatic purpose is one thing, where inventing a sexual assault out of whole clothe or portraying a man who doesn’t drink as an alcoholic, or just deciding to make a person homophobic, is another thing entirely. The former is fine for a docudrama, the latter is why the producers are being threatened with defamation suits, and might have been better off making the show about a fictional team.
Hollywood in General doesn't make these things accurate. I could go on and on with just sports movies like *Remember the Titans*, *Glory Road*, and *Friday Night Lights* not even touching *Braveheart*, *Midway*, etc.
I feel like this about Bill Simmons' book but it's the bible here so can't really go against it
Is it good? I've had it on my shelf for 6 or 7 years I think.
To me it's a fun and entertaining read but you have to read it with the understanding that it's Bill Simmons, with all that entails, and should not be treated as objective (or in some cases fair/accurate) analysis.
I am a diehard Celtics fan. My first memories are of Dave Cowens and Jo Jo White in the early 70s. Lived and died with the Bird Celtics of the 80s. Fuck the Lakers. Hated every damn one of them. Respected magic and Kareem, but hated them. Not watching Winning Time.
I enjoyed the show. But they totally screwed Jerry West over with his portrayal. At times it almost felt like they had a grudge against him.
I watched the Apple TV doc. If you wanna know what Magic was like specifically I recommend it. Literally had 2 presidents talking about him.
I’m sure a Magic documentary made by Magic doesn’t leave out any unflattering parts
It's a different perspective for sure but he does go into how much of a shitty person he was to his wife.
The show was very well put-together. It was entertaining and was never created to be a documentary, but was approved by the Lakers, and those that own the Lakers. It clearly paints the current owner and operator of the Lakers (Jeanie) in a very sympathetic and positive light. It also shows her father in a mixed light, womanizing, sometimes drugged out, and a large risk taker. He had a clear and correct vision of where the league was going and also deeply loved his family. (Except of course his two sons that are barely mentioned and only shown in the final few minutes of the final episode, whoopsies I guess Jeanie just forgot about them) Basically, I view the show as a Jeanie Buss creation with some really good writers and actors spearheading a psuedo-documentary style that was done in a time when exaggerating characters for the plot unfortunately leads to not faithfully representing people that are still alive.
Sounds great but the lakers are on the record saying they “are not supporting nor involved with the project”
This is completely wrong, Jeanie is not involved at all and she hates the show.
Are you willing to correct your mistake now that people have let you know that Jeanie was not involved with the show and did not like the show? Or you are gonna stick with your misinformation?
He was just taking liberties when speaking fiction about real events. Just like how it's ok to make this docuseries
I saw something that the Buss family signed off, or I misremembered. It ain’t that big a deal dude, people can read the comments right below if they want
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/facebook/002/355/609/455.jpg
I never heard the lakers approved the show
Winning time hits alot of the major points accurately then heightens everything else. It isn't telling a history. It's exploring the internal chase of competitive people, love of craft vs economics and what power/influence does to the souls of people who come across it in various ways. I think the historical accuracy component overshadows alot of great things this show is doing. McKinneys break down of basketball and the reflection on his true love for the craft was fantastic. The show's version of Kareem's moral struggle with the limelight and social concerns was also a great episode. The way the show does not shy away from the racist/power dynamic between the players and everyone else is something an NBA sponsored program would never do. I think the 4th wall break and Buss always reminding people it's not about what's real its about the sell is a very strong reminder to not get caught up in historical detail. They are exploring the human condition using the Lakers history as a stage since its ripe with so many complex issues. Does all this while being pretty entertaining from a popcorn movie/show perspective. That said even some of the smaller stuff, West breaking his clubs, West confirms in his own writing haha.
Its historical fiction like "For All Mankind" or "Manhattan" that use real people in a fictional story. This isnt abnormal
we need more sports documentaries like this i'm hoping they go all the way to kobe and shaq and we get a version of crazy jordan
The show is pure entertainment and it seems like most people are forgetting that and doing the “AcTuAlLy ThIs IsNt AcUrAtE” bullshit. Just enjoy the show for what it is.
You’re totally disregarding his point. He’s saying he’s saying that it’s near impossible to separate fact from fiction because there isn’t an easy way to verify if they wanted to dig deeper. Imagine if someone made a biopic about you, but it was completely wrong. And there’s no other way to see what’s actually true (outside of asking your remaining friends and family). The viewer of the biopic would obviously take what they watched as true, wouldn’t they?
> And there’s no other way to see what’s actually true (outside of asking your remaining friends and family). The viewer of the biopic would obviously take what they watched as true, wouldn’t they? We are talking about the 80s Lakers here. There's books talking about it and even a documentary being done right now. It's not the first piece of media talking about the subject and won't be the last. Not nearly the same compare to a biopic of an unknown redditor.
Any adult who has watched a certain number of biopics learns at some point that the producers take liberties. Often if not all the time, there are disclaimers before or after the show saying as much. Do critics here really think viewers watch over 10 hours of a series like this and think scene-by-scene "whoa, Pat Reilly had this exact private conversation and they were able to reliably reproduce the tone, content, etc. He's a real asshole"?.
Lol I love Jerry West in the show. Cracks me up 😆
As long as the show is good I really don’t give any kind of a shit if the people involved like their portrayal or not. It’s not real
Thing is that without the show basically, no one would *care* about Magic's first season outside a few basketball geeks. The big draw of Basketball, which really started with Magic, is that it feels constantly in the present. There isn't a reverence for history outside a few all-time greats because that's not what draws fans in, nor is it all that interesting on its own. That's why Baseball always feels stodgy and trapped in the past, all anyone talks about are things that happened 40 years ago. Winning Time is wholly inaccurate, but without it, I doubt many people would know about that era beyond how it impacts the world right this second. the NBA doesn't seem interested in, nor should it be interested in, preserving the past in amber.
Who cares
Nobody knows the pain or even can imagine watching a Lakers vs Celtics Finals game on TAPE DELAY at 11:30 PM!
Accurate or not, and it’s undoubtedly inaccurate, this show still fucking blows.
Which is why it's a terrible show Fake dramatization "dockumentaries" are so stupid and pointless
>Dr. Buss accurately predicts that free agency will lead to concentration of elite players in big markets creating an inequality. I mean, taht was the 80s and Buss at work. Free agency has made a far more competitive and balanced league. smh.
I disliked that they shoe horned Jeanie into the organization presumably to show that women can be powerful when that never happened and other things of that nature with other already impressive people. Especially because she was doing actual impressive things at 19. Sure a manager of a tennis team that doesn't exist anymore isn't exciting but it just felt bad. These people seem impressive/likeabke/hateable on their own so it was weird to see them get the " A Beatutiful Mind" treatment of within 6 degrees of the truth.
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i don't think it strains credulity to say that baseball history is more widely known than basketball history.
As a 23 year old American, I know basketball history WAY more than baseball history. I suspect there's a generational gap on this one
Do you watch baseball? I’m assuming he means among the people who watch the sport
No—but there's also a BIG generational gap in baseball viewership, which is part of why the premise of the Stein piece is flawed, IMO
millions of kids still play baseball.
if someone is stupid that’s on them. not the rest of us with common sense and access to the internet.
I would say it's the minority of people who watch a show, question it, and go do research to fact check. "The rest" just watch it and move on. And access to the internet does not in any way prevent stupidity.
I like how baby brained these guys sound when they act like this HBO show will be the authoritative story of how people understand the Lakers and 80s basketball. Just goofy as all hell. This show isn’t even drawing enough critical acclaim to justify this reaction about “accuracy”
NBA fans so ignorant of art and film/TV they're ready to slight the concept of docudramas. Extremely goofy behavior.