After The Last Dance’s success in 2020, there have been a few more shows that basketball fans have been eagerly waiting for over the last year or so. One of them which is currently ongoing is ‘Winning Time’ the show based on the Showtime Lakers dynasty, how they came together and became one of the greatest teams to have graced the NBA.
The series have received high ratings and praise from the people that have watched it so far, but there is one very important figure that doesn’t seem to be too impressed by it. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, one of the key figures in both the team and the show, doesn’t think quite highly of the way it’s been made. And Kareem has a sharp pen, one that he has used to write a scathing review of what he calls the ‘bland characterization’ in the show.
“I’ll start with the bland characterization. The characters are crude stick-figure representations that resemble real people the way Lego Hans 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.
“Jerry Buss is Egomaniac Entrepreneur, Jerry West is Crazed Coach, Magic Johnson is Sexual Simpleton, I’m Pompous Prick. They are caricatures, not characters. Amusement park portraits that emphasize one physical feature to amplify your appearance—but never touching the essence.
“The result of using caricatures instead of fully developed characters is that the plot becomes frenetic melodrama, sensationalized invented moments to excite the senses but reveal nothing deeper. It’s as if he strung together a bunch of flashing colored lights and told us, ‘This is the spirit of Christmas.'”
This is a fair harsh critique coming from Kareem, who is well-respected as an author and is one of the ultimate authorities on the story that the show is telling as well. While dramatization and a little bit of simplification are necessary to create an entertaining show, it would seem that Abdul-Jabbar isn’t thrilled at all with the way the showrunners have made it happen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqbWwKx1nBU
