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.”