The Bingeworthy buds, Mike DeAngelo and Playlist Editor-in-Chief Rodrigo Perez, are back to talk about all of the TV news and shows that are worth your time. This week finds our hosts digging into one of the new HBO series, “Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty.”
The new Adam McKay (“Succession,” “Don’t Look Up,” “Anchorman“) show follows, as the title suggests, the rise of the 80’s Lakers Dynasty led by a new and controversial team owner, Jerry Buss (John C. Reilly), and a high-profile rookie, Magic Johnson (Quincy Isaiah). After the discussion, writer/showrunner Max Borenstein, writer/executive producer Rodney Barnes, and actor Quincy Isaiah, who plays the charismatic Magic Johnson, stop by to discuss how the show became the prestige show that it is.
“Jim Hecht had optioned this book (‘Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley, and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty of the 1980s‘), he’s a huge Lakers fan and we had some mutual friends in common,” showrunner Max Borenstein said. “He had partnered with Adam McKay and Kevin Messick and HBO and they were looking for someone to kind of come aboard and adapt it and write it and showrun it. And through mutual friends, he found out that I grew up in L.A., that I was a Lakers fan and I guess he knew something about my work and thought maybe I’d gravitate to it. I read Jeff’s book and it was exactly the synthesis of all the things that I love. It’s a story about L.A., about basketball, and this moment where L.A. basketball transformed culture.”
Max Borenstein’s long-time collaborator Rodney Barnes also came aboard shortly after and, upon joining, wanted to make sure that the show prioritized layered storytelling when it came to the characters on the court.
“I wanted to add a human dimension to the guys that played the game because it would be really easy, and I won’t name any names but one is ringing in my head, where it’s just about guys having fun and playing a game and they chase chicks and they get drunk and they do stuff and here you’re dealing with a period of time where a lot of guys are wrestling with some serious stuff,” Barnes shared. “Spencer Haywood came from a really traumatic background, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was a seminal figure in the Civil Rights Movement and how do you bring that stuff in if you’re just talking about basketball? And so, for me, it was important to be able to speak to all of it and basketball, as well.”
You can listen to the entire deep-dive episode & interviews with writer/showrunner Max Borenstein, writer/executive producer Rodney Barnes, and actor Quincy Isaiah below:
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