LOS ANGELES — When NBA legend Michael Jordan reminisced about his remarkable career and final championship season with the Chicago Bulls in 2020's "The Last Dance," viewers turned up in droves, making the ESPN docuseries an instant smash.
HBO is hoping to score a similar victory with a strikingly different story of basketball greatness, one that could easily be subtitled "Flashdance." "Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty" stars a veteran team of top-tier performers and a pair of screen rookies portraying NBA legends Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
Set at the start of the "Showtime" era of the 1980s Los Angeles Lakers, the series, which premieres Sunday, depicts how the team, with an assist from the fresh-faced rookie Johnson and the dominant but moody Abdul-Jabbar, realized owner Jerry Buss' revolutionary vision of mixing muscular athleticism with noisy, sexy entertainment, transforming the franchise into a dazzling powerhouse with worldwide popularity.
