Is the HBO Lakers series Winning Time a slam dunk?

14:05With sports dramas, where's the line between fact and fiction?

The Showtime Lakers have been thrust back into the spotlight thanks to Season 2 of HBO's sports drama series, Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty, which dropped earlier this month.

Based on a book called Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley, and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty of the 1980s by Jeff Pearlman, the dramatization tells the story of how the Lakers became the Showtime Lakers — an era in the franchise's history when the team played a run-and-gun style of basketball, led by Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

Sports culture critic Morgan Campbell and comedian/podcaster Ashley Ray join guest host Amil Niazi to talk about what they love about the series — and why the real-life figures featured in it might not be fans.

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow the Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud podcast, on your favourite podcast player.

Amil: For those who are less familiar with the Lakers' legacy, what's the significance of the time period that we're talking about in Winning Time?

Morgan: There's a segment of the audience that thinks of the Lakers' glory years as Phil Jackson, Shaquille O'Neal and Kobe Bryant. But if you're a little bit older, you remember kind of the tail end of the Showtime Lakers. These are the group of people that really put the Lakers on the map — so that's Magic Johnson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Pat Riley as the coach. And where Winning Time starts out is the season that Magic arrives. I think what most people don't remember is that the Lakers were struggling on the court and financially before this crew of people arrived to propel them into the national spotlight.

WATCH | Season 1 Recap of Winning Time:

Amil: Morgan, let's start with the positives about the show because the reaction is mixed. What do you like about Winning Time?

Morgan: What I noticed was the amount of money they spent on the show…. They have a bunch of people on the show that don't work cheap, including Robert Glasper doing the soundtrack for the show, and Black Thought a.k.a. Tarik Trotter from The Roots does the theme song.

Understanding that it is dramatized and exaggerated, getting the story of how Magic Johnson is being portrayed now as this really unrefined country bumpkin dropped into the middle of Los Angeles, and having to deal with like these worldly city-slickers like Norm Nixon — the level of detail, to me, is intriguing.

WATCH | A sneak peak at Winning Time Season 2:

Amil: Ashley, you're a comedian and an actor. The tone and the acting is a bit different. It's a bit jarring at first because it is so irreverent. How do you feel about the tone of the show?

Ashley: I think it's perfect. The person who is playing Magic Johnson, Quincy Isaiah, doesn't even have a Wikipedia page — that's how fresh he is to acting. The actor who is playing Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Solomon Hughes, was an actual basketball player; he did not have any acting experience. So they have found a cast of young people to really bring a new energy to this vibe of athletes who, like you said, are being presented as country bumpkins who don't really fit into this world.

I do think the actor who plays Kareem is doing my favorite job. He has brought Kareem to life in a new way for me, even though I know Kareem hates the portrayal [and] what they're doing with him by making him seem so robotic. I just think it really works, and particularly when on the other side you have people like Jason Segel, Adrien Brody, who are names I've loved since I was in high school, and they're doing things I never thought they would have done in their careers.

Morgan: Do y'all realize how difficult it is to cast Kareem Abdul-Jabbar?

Amil: Why do you think that is?

Morgan:  Because Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is seven-foot-three in real life. So you need somebody who is noticeably taller than Magic Johnson. And the Magic Johnson character has to be noticeably taller than the regular people around him. So to get this Kareem Abdul-Jabbar character, this person's got to be at least six-foot-seven, six-foot-eight to make all the other people look shorter by contrast, and still has to be able to act a little bit. So they did an amazing job just casting Kareem — and if the Kareem character is a little bit wooden and over-done, I can live with it. What's the alternative? It's getting a Kareem that's six-foot-two, and on screen he's shorter than Magic. You can't do that.

Amil: OK, when you add that detail, it actually makes a lot of sense. Now I'm suddenly more in than I ever was before. A lot of people love the show, but some of the Lakers and staff depicted in the series are not fans. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar called it deliberately dishonest. What do you think?

Ashley: I think we live in this era now where celebrities are so used to creating and producing their own documentaries, having input where they get to control their image. And Magic Johnson had that. His documentary They Call Me Magic on Apple TV+ came out, and it's a glowing portrait of him. He got every [chance] to say, "Don't go into the dark details." So I think since we do get both portraits … it's OK to have Winning Time be a little more fictitious or entertainment-based, since the real story is out there. If you want to know about Magic Johnson, there are a million books, documentaries, 30 for 30 things you can watch. So let us have fun.

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Panel produced by Ty Callender.