Kareem Abdul-Jabbar criticizes HBO's Winning Time, calling it "drearily dull"
The former Laker comments on the series in a new Substack blog post
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has stated his piece on the HBO series Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty, and boy does he have some critiques. The legendary basketball player’s issues do not lie with any inaccuracies or dramatization of the events covered in the series, but come from a storytelling perspective. For Abdul-Jabbar, if you’re going to be historically inaccurate, at least make it interesting.
“There is only one immutable sin in writing: Don’t Be Boring! Winning Time commits that sin over and over,” Abdul-Jabbar wrote in a substack blog titled “Winning Time Isn’t Just Deliberately Dishonest, It’s Drearily Dull.”
“I’ll start with the bland characterization. The characters are crude stick-figure representations that resemble real people, the way Lego Han Solo resembles Harrison Ford. Each character is reduced to a single bold trait, as if the writers were afraid anything more complex would tax the viewers’ comprehension.”
However, he does want to make clear that he never said “fuck you” to a child actor as the series suggests. He points this out as he says it could affect his charity the Skyhook Foundation.
“I never said ‘fuck off’ to the child actor [Ross Harris] in Airplane!, nor have I ever said that to any child,” Abdul-Jabbar writes. “I realize this was a shorthand way of showing my perceived aloofness during that time, even though I have often spoken about my intense, almost debilitating shyness. The filmmakers had access to that information, but truth and insight were not on their agenda. Shocking moments were.”
He’s not the only former Laker team member to comment on the show so far. Magic Johnson recently shared his feelings about the series and called out HBO and other executives for not reaching out to a single member of the team while creating Winning Time.
“First of all, you can’t do a story about the Lakers without the Lakers,” says Johnson. “The real Lakers. You gotta have the guys. There’s no way to duplicate Showtime. I don’t care who you get.”
Winning Time is currently airing on HBO and HBO Max. The series has been renewed for a second season.