Not only will Lakers CEO Jeanie Buss serve as an executive producer associated with “Legacy, ” but all the children of late owner Jerry Buss sit to get interviews, along with an extensive roster of the team’s former players, instructors and high-profile opponents.
Having said that, director Antoine Fuqua (whose documentary credits include the sports-related “What’s My Name: Muhammad Ali” ) provides tipped the weighing scales too heavily towards Jerry Buss great determination to turn the particular NBA’s showiest business into a family company. The result is a series peppered with highlights but that performs like too much of a licensed product, weighted down with Buss family members reminiscing.
In some respects, the entire exercise comes across being an extended response to “Winning Time, ” seeking to reclaim the team’s narrative after that show’s exaggerated portrait associated with key Lakers players and personnel, which usually too often bordered on parody.
Jerry West, for example , who publicly criticized the particular HBO show , gets to calmly and openly discuss just how demanding he was as a coach, saying of the players, “I felt sorry to them having to play for me personally, ” while others enjoy his brilliant eye for identifying talent in his executive capacity.
Fuqua also contextualizes “Legacy” in the wider sociological context of Los Angeles, a city of diverse communities taken together by the collective love of the Lakers and Dodgers — at least, when the teams are winning. From that perspective, the series includes a good deal in common along with last year’s ESPN documentary “Once Upon a moment in Queens, ” devoted to the Mets plus their relationship with New York.
Still, the production already enamored with personalities sometimes races through the real basketball, to the point where if you blink two times during the portion dedicated to the ’80s teams, you might miss another championship.
What’s left, after that, are the bits and pieces: Just how Buss turned the particular Forum, where the Lakers played, into the most popular night spot inside a town of superstars; the Lakers Girls and other innovations that fellow owners rushed to copy, such as Buss jacking up the cost of floor seats through $10. 50 to $65; and Miracle Johnson’s unprecedented 25-year contract, prompting teammate Jamaal Wilkes and the rest of the squad in order to ask of Johnson’s close ties towards the owner, “Is this individual one of us, or one of them? ”
“Legacy” shoots a much higher proportion when the subject becomes to basketball, with Julius Erving, a. k. a. Dr . J, praising Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as “the greatest of all time, inch and Celtics star Larry Bird conveying a similar sense of awe, saying he had hoped his brother saw him standing on the court close to the Lakers big man.
Six of the 10 episodes were made available, sufficient to get through the Lakers’ down years right after Abdul-Jabbar retired and Johnson’s HIV medical diagnosis, and into the putting your signature on of Shaquille O’Neal and drafting of teen sensation Kobe Bryant , triggering a title-winning resurgence.
Even after that, there’s as much attention, seemingly, in trainer Phil Jackson’s private relationship with Jeanie Buss. Nor could the filmmakers withstand adding the obligatory Hollywood pizzazz towards the proceedings, with celeb Lakers fans Take advantage of Lowe, Flea plus Snoop Dogg one of the voices receiving ample screen time.
For the La lakers faithful, or honestly anyone interested in the particular NBA’s surge in the Magic-Bird matchups through today, there might be still a lot in order to like here. Yet “Legacy” ultimately proves too committed to the Buss family’s portion of this sprawling story.
In this sense, the question Wilkes posed regarding Johnson echoes in a slightly different way for audiences — namely, is this being made for us, or is it becoming made for them?
“Legacy: The True Story of the LA Lakers” variants Aug. 15 on Hulu.