Retired Los Angeles Lakers forward Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is just like most people—over 7 feet tall and brimming with opinions on Girls, Lena Dunham’s false flag ruse on behalf of the shadow government to exhaust all the populace’s anger on her HBO show so it will more compliantly hand over its guns. The NBA’s all-time leading scorer and part-time television critic certainly taps into some of those familiar emotions in his appraisal of the series, which was inspired by Dunham’s recent Daily Show lament over being wished death upon by “58-year-old men.” As one of those typical over-50-year-olds, albeit one with an enviable skyhook, Abdul-Jabbar felt compelled to respond and ask, if Girls “wants to tell us something important about twentysomething females of the 21st Century,” what is it telling us and, specifically, retired NBA star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar?
Of course, much like his years next to Magic Johnson, Abdul-Jabbar’s opinions aren’t especially distinguished: He thought the first season was so white it left the viewer “snow blind,” even if that viewer was wearing protective goggles. He thinks the introduction of Donald Glover as a “jungle fever lover” was little more than forced tokenism and that “a black dildo would have sufficed and cost less.” (Okay, that’s actually a new one.) It takes itself too seriously a lot of the time, and it isn’t funny enough to justify how frustrating its characters are. Still, Abdul-Jabbar at least allows that the show’s “heart and mind is in the right place” and it’s generally worth paying attention to, while arguing that much of the criticism it’s faced is just the burden of an audience’s “desperation for a generational voice that they turn to a sitcom to express it rather than great literature.”
In conclusion, listen, kid: Lena Dunham is out there busting her buns every Sunday night. Tell your old man to drag the audience’s unfair expectations up and down the court for 28 minutes.