Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty - Season 1 (Blu-ray)

The first season of Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty is excellent and gets a Blu-ray release to match. In the late 1970s, real estate magnate Dr. Jerry Buss (John C. Reilly, Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!) buys the L.A. Lakers basketball club from the NBA. His mother Jessie (Sally Field, The Flying Nun) tries to stop him, but the impulsive, energetic Jerry is determined. In exchange for all his money and the Chrysler building in New York, he now owns a colorless club with a coach at the helm who has never won an award. This hot-tempered former player Jerry West (Jason Clarke, Brotherhood) is also adamantly against attracting the talented Earvin Johnson (Quincy Isaiah), then better known as 'Magic' Johnson.



When Jerry Buss pushes on and Magic Johnson signs on anyway, West resigns and problems pile up a few days before the first training camp. Experienced players such as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (Solomon Hughes in his first role) and Norm Nixon (DeVaughn Nixon, Snowfall) don't like the cheerful, chatty and confident rookie Johnson. Also, innovative new coach Jack McKinney (Tracy Letts, Homeland) and his Shakespeare-quoting right-hand man Paul Westhead (Jason Segel, How I Met Your Mother) try to get the team to play a new, highly dynamic and surprising kind of basketball that most players can get used to with great difficulty. Meanwhile, Jerry Buss asks manager Claire Rothman (Gaby Hoffmann, Transparent) and his own daughter Jeanie (Hadley Robinson, Utopia) to modernize the facilities, but meddles with all the details and doesn't always take their work seriously.

[quote-6356] The ten-part first season of the HBO series Winning Time has become an extremely entertaining series. The series portrays the harsh world of top sport with a lot of humor: tough managers, racism, sexism, sports agents who work like vultures, athletes with big egos and the well-known temptations such as booze, drugs and beautiful women in the world of the fame. Because of the humour, you are taken into the absurdity of this top sport in one episode, only to be taken into the ruthless exploitation of players, manipulative coaches and shocking cases of trickery and deceit in the next episode.

I think the decoration of the series is very successful. By using grainy images, sometimes of Super 8 or VHS video quality, you really feel the atmosphere of the late 1970s splash from the screen. The opening theme of the series is also a wonderfully funky theme with beautiful images from that era. The makers use various nice details, such as the very short jump of the image after the opening theme has ended, just like an old video tape. That, coupled with the fact that Jerry Buss sometimes directly addresses you as a viewer to take you into his working method, ideas or the background of a scene (the so-called 'breaking the fourth wall'), results in beautiful television.



None of the main characters is one-dimensional, each character has his or her (sometimes very) dark sides. In addition to the basketball players, there are several other colorful roles: rival coaches, family members, and the employees of the L.A. Lakers. The series is a dramatization of the real events and partly because of that there was also criticism from those really involved in the rise of the L.A. Lakers, given several shocking scenes I can imagine that. In any case, the makers sometimes overuse artistic liberty. The series is subtitled: The rise of the Lakers Dynasty. During the televised playoffs in 1980, Jessie, Jerry Buss' mother, asks if Dynasty can go instead of basketball. However, the Dynasty series did not premiere until January 1981.

The series itself is excellent, and gets a Blu-ray release to match. In addition to the English and French audio, there are subtitles in Dutch, French and English for the hearing impaired. For each episode there is a retrospective titled The Forum in which three people involved look back in six to seven minutes. There are also nine short films of two to four minutes, each of which discusses details of the series. The costumes, behind the scenes, the locations, the training for the basketball scenes and various interviews with the actors. A wonderful release of a top series, where season two has now premiered on HBO.