Antoine Fuqua’s Hulu Docuseries Suffers
Lakers boasts a slightly ludicrous title that implies that other recent chronicles of the Lakers might or might not be “true” — though its first chapter is beat-for-beat the story recounted in the first season of HBO’s Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty and its first four chapters are very, very, very close to the story recounted in Apple TV+’s They Call Me Magic.
Access is great, but Jeanie, current CEO and controlling owner of the Lakers, is an executive producer on Legacy along with several other key Lakers executives.
Legacy is pretty decent when it’s the story of a tension-plagued family passive-aggressively, and eventually active-aggressively, competing for the family business — like Succession if Kendall Roy were an executive producer, with a fun, star-studded basketball story in the background.
The problem is that you can’t do the story without honoring Jerry, and Jerry Buss died in 2013, so the first four episodes are primarily generic basketball stuff with Jerry appearing in archival footage and the rest of the kids discussing their wildly nepotistic variations on Bring Your Kid to Work Day.
So it’s the same old stories about how the NBA was on the verge of disaster when Buss bought the Lakers; the same old stories about Buss’ playboy (and Playboy) lifestyle and how he turned the Lakers into a Hollywood-style show; the same old stories about drafting Magic Johnson and the early butting of heads between Magic and future THR columnist Kareem Abdul-Jabbar; the same old stories about the rivalry with the Celtics.
And it’s all of the same talking heads, from easily frustrated executive Jerry West to most of the necessary Lakers stars led by Magic and Kareem to poor Larry Bird as That Representative Boston Adversary.
It’s still amusing and there are different levels of candor here compared to previous projects — Magic, oddly, seems much more comfortable as a supporting figure than in the series that bore his name — but it’s basically never revelatory.
It’s a Lakers story with the Buss family in the background and it’s exclusively by-the-numbers documentary filmmaking.