Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Rips HBO's 'Winning Time,' Calls It 'Boring' and 'Shallow'

Basketball icon Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is not a fan of HBO's new hit series Winning Time which satircally chronicles the rise of Kareem's "Showtime Lakers" of the 1980s. 

Kareem slammed the show in a recent blog post where he asked, “How did so many talented people go so terribly wrong?” While Abdul-Jabbar wasn't particularly upset about how he is portrayed in the series, he is put off by how "boring" the show is "over and over." 

“I thought the poor quality of ‘Don’t Look Up’ was an anomaly,” Abdul-Jabbar writes. “I hoped that perhaps because he was overwhelmed by his passion about global warming, he let his commitment overshadow his critical eye. But now that ‘Winning Time’ suffers from some of the same shallowness and lazy writing, I’m not so sure.”

Kareem pointed out how underdeveloped the characters are in the show. “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.”

He went on to criticize the show for its portrayal of Jerry West. “[Jerry] has openly discussed his struggle with mental health, especially depression,” Abdul-Jabbar writes. “Instead of exploring his issues with compassion as a way to better understand the man, they turn him into a Wile E. Coyote cartoon to be laughed at. He never broke golf clubs, he didn’t throw his trophy through the window. Sure, those actions make dramatic moments, but they reek of facile exploitation of the man rather than exploration of character.”

Source: Variety