Why ‘Winning Time’ Lost

Max canceled Winning Time after two seasons.

Of course it did.

The problem with Winning Time wasn’t its source material, whether that was Jeff Pearlman’s book about the 1980s Lakers or those actual Lakers, depending on your definition of source material. The Lakers of the 1980s provide plenty of fun and fertile material. It was an era when basketball wasn’t a sterile, predictable enterprise. Plus: cocaine. And Hollywood.

The problem also wasn’t a shortage of interest on the part of Max, once known as HBO. If Adam McKay is involved, then by the transitive properties of prestige television, someone gives a shit.

And the problem certainly wasn’t John C. Reilly because casting John C. Reilly is never a problem.

No, the problem is the inherent difficulty of making a TV show about basketball.

I know a little about this problem, and not just because I played basketball professionally for just shy of a decade—a decade that included a three-week training camp stint with those very same Lakers. (Albeit long after the Lakers depicted in Winning Time.)

My actual bona fides are even stronger. I once tried to make a TV show about basketball.

In 2005, while playing for the Phoenix Suns, I wrote a blog for Suns.com about the life of a benchwarming NBA player—a writing gig I was uniquely suited for because I was, at the time, a benchwarming NBA player.

That blog turned into a book deal that also brought me first contact with the grand poobah of this very website when Slate.com asked Neal and me to write a back-and-forth about the NBA Playoffs, back before Slate.com was exclusively a purveyor of articles like “Plants Live In Dirt. That’s A Problem.”

My book deal led to a TV pilot and I moved to Los Angeles (the first time) to help spend $3.6 million of Fox’s money on the pilot episode of a series we called The 12^th Man, to the chagrin of the Texas A&M football program, which sent us a cease and desist order because that’s what they call their cheering section. (Who knew?!)

We never addressed that cease and desist order. We never had to. The 12^th Man never made it to air. This in spite of it being a “hot” pilot in town. And in spite of it having as its executive producer one Dan Fogelman, who went on to write Cars, Crazy Stupid Love, and This Is Us. And in spite of those 3.6 million reasons for Fox to be interested in its success.

The 12^th Man shared one chief characteristic with Winning Time: it wasn’t very good.

In my halcyon days as a television producer, I:

–Dated an actress who took me to meet Peter Bogdanovich, who then hit on the actress while I was sitting next to her.

–Got to meet Wallace Shawn, who played the agent in The 12^th Man and who I did not ask to repeat any lines from The Princess Bride even though that is my favorite movie.

–Figured out why it is impossible to make a television show about professional basketball.

These are those reasons:

First, it is really, really hard to find actors who look like professional basketball players. This isn’t just because we professional basketball players are the size and shape of members of the Na’vi tribe; it’s also because basketball is different from baseball and football because you can’t hide a basketball player under a helmet and pads or even under a cap and baggy pants.

Second, when you’re making a show about basketball, you’re damned if you do show basketball and damned if you don’t show basketball.

In another of my weird life experiences, I went to New Orleans to be a basketball extra in the movie Glory Road. (That’s Road, not Hole.)

We had on hand the same legendary producer/choreographer who’d helped make Remember the Titans. It still took a week to shoot “one” game, which translated into approximately 90 seconds of screen time.

Basketball is unlike baseball or football (or even golf or boxing) in another way. In those sports—all of which translate more effectively to the screen—the possible outcomes are fixed according to a set of constraints. A play at the plate involves only a couple of variables: the runner and the catcher. It’s similar in football. You can get in close and make a tackle look real because you can isolate the tackler and the tacklee.

But filming a basketball scene is like trying catch marbles with your elbows.

The third thing I learned is also the most important—and the most germane to the fate of Winning Time. When it comes to the story behind the sports story, nobody cares. It’s like Patton Oswalt once ranted, about the prequels to the original three Star Wars movies:

“I DON’T GIVE A SHIT WHERE THE STUFF I LOVE COMES FROM! I JUST LOVE THE STUFF I LOVE!”

People love their sports and they don’t care about the origin stories behind those sports. They don’t care that Magic Johnson’s mom was fierce but protective and they don’t care whether Jerry West was or was not out of his mind and they don’t care that Pat Riley almost didn’t become Pat Riley. They don’t even care that Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is fucking weird. Which he is. He auditioned to play the coach on The 12^th Man and even that was weird.Sports fans care about what happens when the ball goes up, the lights go down, and the actual Magic Johnson hits a running hook shot to win an NBA championship.

They don’t need another HBO show to care about, too. Even if the Lakers are cool and Adam McKay is involved and John C. Reilly gets to play Jerry Buss and there are boobs, sometimes.

We’ve got the game film. And that’s plenty.