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    The Pitfalls of Oven-Ready TV

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    Prestige shows like “Winning Time” love to dramatize the real people at the heart of recent-ish events. It doesn’t always go well.It’s May 1980 at the Forum in Los Angeles, and the crowd is in a frenzy as the rookie Magic Johnson and the legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar lead the Lakers to their first N.B.A. championship in eight years. This is the setting for the recently completed first season of HBO’s “Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty,” which dives into its subject matter with brio. Helmed by the ubiquitous Adam McKay — director of “The Big Short,” “Don’t Look Up” and a parade of successful film comedies — “Winning Time” is an antic chronicle of the Lakers’ highly eventful 1979-80 season, with main characters that include not just Johnson and Abdul-Jabbar but other Lakers titans like the coach Pat Riley and the owner Jerry Buss. Its 10-episode arc is fast and fun, full of on-court magnetism and off-court machismo, and it all actually happened. Sort of.Many of the people depicted in the show will be familiar to basketball-loving viewers, and that’s part of the appeal: There is a giddy thrill in watching the origin stories of icons still in the public consciousness. And for those who lived through this total blast of a Lakers season, it has to be unbelievably fun reliving it on HBO. But while the acknowledged source material for “Winning Time” is the longtime reporter Jeff Pearlman’s 2014 book “Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty of the 1980s,” the process of adapting it seems to have been as freewheeling as the team’s run-and-gun offense. This is most apparent in the show’s treatment of the Hall of Fame guard turned coach turned legendary league executive Jerry West.West’s character on “Winning Time” is a doozy. As played by the Australian actor Jason Clarke, he is a basketball savant with serious rage issues, prone to throwing trophies, breaking golf clubs and drinking to excess. It’s a humorous and not completely unsympathetic portrait. At one point in the show, just after Buss, the new team owner, has given his staff a motivational speech, West makes a grandiose public display of quitting his job as head coach, completely souring the vibe. Eventually West returns to the office without much explanation. Reinstalled as a sort of omniscient consultant on a highly informal basis, he remains a profane, hair-trigger wild card through the rest of the season.There is a giddy thrill in watching the origin stories of icons still in the public consciousness.But the West in “Winning Time” doesn’t square with the real Jerry West’s recollections, or with the recollections of many others who were part of the Lakers organization at the time. When West recently asked HBO for a retraction and an apology, several figures from the show, including Abdul-Jabbar (who also objected to his own portrayal) and the former Forum executive Claire Rothman, were quick to take his side. They maintain that West was not a yeller and not erratic in his work and that they never saw him drinking in his office. And while it’s always possible that time and friendship have softened everyone’s memories, it’s notable that West’s more outrageous moments on the show aren’t in Pearlman’s book. In response to West’s criticism, HBO released a statement saying that “Winning Time” is “based on extensive factual research and reliable sourcing,” but that it is “not a documentary.”You could say the same for a lot of shows these days. From the latest iteration of “The Staircase,” dramatizing a mysterious death in North Carolina that was chronicled in a 2004 documentary, to “WeCrashed,” about the failed start-up WeWork, to “Pam & Tommy,” which reimagines Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s marriage and sex tape, contemporary television is awash in semi-fictionalized accounts of recent-ish events. These shows elide the logistical and cost concerns associated with telling a new story from scratch by falling back on a prefabricated narrative. The reason for this boomlet — call it Oven-Ready TV — is the same reason Hollywood churns out superhero movies: It’s seen as a safe form of intellectual property to invest in. “Everything’s expensive to make, and everyone wants to keep their job,” the journalist turned true-crime TV writer Bruce Bennett told me. “If you walk in the door pitching something that’s been done in some other medium or arena, there’s a built-in sense of safety and familiarity for the development and production people who have to pay for the thing.”The most prominent recent example of this phenomenon is “The Dropout,” Hulu’s arch dramatization of the rise and fall of the Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, which followed the 2018 book “Bad Blood,” a raft of overlapping podcasts and an HBO documentary by Alex Gibney called “The Inventor.” Watching the dramatization back-to-back with Gibney’s film, it’s striking how much stranger Holmes seems in real life when compared with Amanda Seyfried’s excellent, humanizing portrayal. Where “Winning Time” uses West’s character to amp up the drama, “The Dropout” seems to tone Holmes down for its own purposes — making her more likable, more sympathetic. It’s an understandable narrative decision, but also a curious one, given how easy it is to observe the real Holmes in so many venues and notice the glaring difference. (Another recent example, “Inventing Anna,” made many journalists’ eyes roll for its inauthentic portrayal of the reporting process and life at New York magazine.)‘If you walk in the door pitching something that’s been done in some other medium or arena, there’s a built-in sense of safety and familiarity.’But what do any of these shows owe to the people they are depicting, and to the viewer who spends many, many hours with characters they might reasonably expect to be something like the real thing? West, a victim of child poverty and domestic violence, has been painfully candid about the adverse circumstances that shaped him and his desperate bouts with anxiety and depression. He wrote about this in his 2011 autobiography, “West By West: My Charmed, Tormented Life,” and a beautiful Sports Illustrated feature that same year went even further in chronicling West’s struggles with self-loathing and suicidal thoughts.The producers of “Winning Time” are clearly familiar with this part of West’s story — at one point in the show, he lies catatonic in a dark room for days — which makes the decision to render him a fool even stranger. Perhaps McKay’s taste for clownish characterization explains it. The director made his bones with gloriously absurd fare like “Talladega Nights” and “Anchorman,” but even his more topical films are full of outsize satirical portrayals. As one critic wrote about McKay’s version of Dick Cheney in “Vice,” “McKay seems to think we can’t be trusted to grasp what he sees as Cheney’s Machiavellian villainy unless he spells it out in cartoon language.”The West in “Winning Time” is certainly a cartoon. Now that the series has been greenlit for a second season, it will be interesting to see whether the showrunners take West’s pushback and deep love for the Lakers into account as they develop his character and lay out his coming achievements. These include five championships in the 1980s and the signing of Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant, setting off another Lakers dynasty in the ’90s. Perhaps in future episodes a more nuanced West will emerge. Or maybe, just as in the Showtime era that “Winning Time” reanimates, the mandate to entertain will always prevail.Source photographs: Warrick Page/HBOElizabeth Nelson is a journalist and singer-songwriter based in Washington. Her band, the Paranoid Style, will release its new LP, “For Executive Meeting,” in August on the Bar/None Records label. More

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      Writers Guild Awards Keep up Momentum for ‘CODA,’ ‘Don’t Look Up’

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      The victories are good news for those films’ Oscar chances: The best picture winner usually also picks up a screenplay trophy.A sudden Oscar front-runner and a dark-horse contender took top honors at the Writers Guild Awards on Sunday night, as the heartwarmer “CODA” and the satirical “Don’t Look Up” prevailed in the adapted and original screenplay categories, respectively.“This is real, legitimate excitement,” the writer-director of “Don’t Look Up,” Adam McKay, said in a pretaped speech. Though several awards shows have returned to in-person gatherings, the WGA ceremony was virtual, and nominees were asked to send in their acceptance speeches ahead of time. Only the winner’s was played during the ceremony.Several major films were ineligible for the WGAs this year because they were not written under a bargaining agreement with the WGA or its sister guilds. So “Belfast” and “The Worst Person in the World” (in the original-screenplay category) and “The Power of the Dog” and “The Lost Daughter” (in the adapted category) were not in the running. And because that significantly whittled down the pool of big contenders, most pundits expected the writer-director Sian Heder’s “CODA,” based on the 2014 French film “La Famille Bélier,” would prevail with the Writers Guild, though “Don’t Look Up” still faced stiff competition from Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Licorice Pizza.”Can the WGA victors also win their Oscar races now that “Belfast” has lost its awards mojo and the surging “CODA” beat “The Power of the Dog” at this weekend’s influential Producers Guild Awards? In a recent screenplay contest at the BAFTAs, “CODA” pulled out another surprise win over “The Power of the Dog,” its biggest best-picture rival. Since the path to the top Oscar almost always winds through the screenplay categories, an adapted-screenplay win for “CODA” on Oscar night could foreshadow the film’s ultimate fate.And though “Don’t Look Up” has a tougher path to the best-picture Oscar, with no notable awards-season wins until now, the WGA victory at least suggests that the original-screenplay race will remain one to watch.Here are some of the other WGA winners:Documentary: “Exposing Muybridge”Drama series: “Succession”Comedy series: “Hacks”New series: “Hacks”Original long-form series: “Mare of Easttown”Adapted long-form series: “Maid” More

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      ‘Don’t Look Up’ Review: Tick, Tick, Kablooey

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      Adam McKay wants you to know that it’s the end of the world and you should absolutely, unequivocally not feel fine. (But do laugh.)Movies love to menace Earth. It’s human nature. In some of the most plausible doomsday flicks — “Meteor,” “Deep Impact” and “Armageddon” — a big space rock threatens annihilation. Usually, if not always happily, someone finally comes to the rescue, though that isn’t the case in the 1951 film “When Worlds Collide.” Before it makes good on its title, this shocker rockets survivalists on an ark to colonize another planet, which is more or less what Elon Musk has talked about with Space X.The director Adam McKay is not in the mood for nihilistic flights of fancy. Our planet is too dear and its future too terrifying, as the accelerated pace of species extinction and global deforestation underscore. But humanity isn’t interested in saving Earth, never mind itself, as the recent Glasgow climate summit reminded us. We’re too numb, dumb, powerless and indifferent, too busy fighting trivial battles. So McKay has made “Don’t Look Up,” a very angry, deeply anguished comedy freak out about how we are blowing it, hurtling toward oblivion. He’s sweetened the bummer setup with plenty of yuks — good, bad, indifferent — but if you weep, it may not be from laughing.Maybe bring hankies, though don’t look for speeches about climate change and global warming. Rather than directly confronting the existential horror of our environmental catastrophe, McKay has taken an allegorical approach in “Don’t Look Up” with a world-destroying comet. Oh sure, on its website, NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office (yes, it’s real) isn’t worried about near-Earth objects, as they’re called: “No known asteroid larger than 140 meters in size has a significant chance to hit Earth for the next 100 years.” Whew. But no matter. The planet is on fire, and so is McKay, who’s embraced his inner Roland Emmerich (“2012”) with a fury by lobbing a great big joke at us.That joke is definitely on us or soon will be in “Don’t Look Up,” which follows a studiously curated ragtag collection of scientists, politicians, military types, journalists and miscellaneous others who face — or don’t — the threat of a rapidly approaching comet. “I heard there’s an asteroid or a comet or something that you don’t like the looks of,” a visibly bored president of the United States (Meryl Streep) says to some anxious scientists who have been granted an imperial audience. The scientists really don’t like what they’ve seen but the president has other things on her mind, including upcoming elections and the friendly perv she’s trying to get placed on the Supreme Court.Packed with big names, many locations and ambitiously staged set pieces (and a lot of giddily terrible hairdos), the movie is a busy, boisterous mixed bag, and whether you laugh or not you may still grit your teeth. The story opens in an observatory where Jennifer Lawrence, who plays a grad student, Kate Dibiasky, first spots the comet. Kate’s giddiness over her discovery soon turns to fear when her professor, Dr. Randall Mindy (a terrific Leonardo DiCaprio), crunches some numbers and realizes the worst. Together, they pass along the bad news. Enter NASA (Rob Morgan), the military (Paul Guilfoyle) and the White House, which is where the movie’s breeziness takes a turn for the ominous.Also for the frantic, strident and obvious. McKay’s touch here is considerably blunter and less productive than it has been in a while. In his two previous movies — “The Big Short” and “Vice” — he blended comedic and dramatic modes to fascinating effect. He experimented with tone and pitch, and played up and down different scales, from the deadly serious to the outrageously silly. It didn’t always work. It proved easier to get into McKay’s groove when you laughed at, say, Margot Robbie explaining subprime mortgages while she’s taking a bubble bath in “The Big Short” than when you watched Christian Bale’s Dick Cheney discussing another American war in “Vice.”The stakes are higher still in “Don’t Look Up,” which grows progressively more frenetic and wobbly as the inevitability of the catastrophe is finally grasped by even the most ridiculous of the movie’s buffoon-rich cast of characters. One problem is that some of McKay’s biggest targets here — specifically in politics and infotainment — have already reached maximum self-parody or tragedy (or both). What is left to satirically skewer when facts are derided as opinion, flat Earthers attend annual conferences and conspiracy theory movements like QAnon have become powerful political forces?Even so, McKay keeps swinging hard and fast, and from the start, establishes a sense of visceral urgency with loose, agitated camerawork and brisk editing that fits the ticking-bomb story. He slings zingers and stages bits of comic business, making fine use of funny faces, jumping eyebrows, slow burns and double takes. Part ethnographer, part sociologist, he is especially good at mining the funny-ha-ha, funny-weird spaces in between people. But he’s not always in control of his material, including some cheap shots that slide into witless sexism. Presidential vanity is always a fair target, but too many of the digs directed at Streep’s character play into gender stereotypes.Streep is a great deal of fun to watch when she’s not unintentionally making you cringe, and Lawrence gives the movie a steady emotional pulse even at its most frantic. McKay’s work with DiCaprio is particularly memorable, partly because Dr. Mindy’s trajectory — from honest, concerned scientist to glib, showboating celebrity — strengthens the movie’s heartbreaking, unspeakable truth: Human narcissism and all that it has wrought, including the destruction of nature, will finally be our downfall. In the end, McKay isn’t doing much more in this movie than yelling at us, but then, we do deserve it.Don’t Look UpRated R for violence, language and the apocalypse. Running time: 2 hours 18 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      How Meryl Streep Prepared to Play the President in ‘Don’t Look Up’

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      Meryl Streep explains how she prepared to play a fictional (and not especially competent) U.S. president in Adam McKay’s apocalyptic satire “Don’t Look Up.”Who would you turn to if you learned a comet was on a collision course with Earth and decisive action was required to prevent the extinction of all life on this planet? If your first thought was Meryl Streep, you have made both an excellent and terrible choice.In “Don’t Look Up,” from the writer-director Adam McKay (“The Big Short,” “Vice”), two scientists played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence find themselves facing this end-of-the-world scenario and must turn to a United States government led by the fictional President Orlean for assistance.The good news (for the movie, which will reach theaters on Dec. 10 and Netflix on Dec. 24) is that Orlean is played by Streep, the venerated film and TV star; the bad news (for humanity) is that Orlean is a self-centered scoundrel who cares a great deal about her public image but little to nothing about running the country.Orlean is one of several malefactors in “Don’t Look Up,” a social satire that McKay wrote about climate change but that he fully expects will be interpreted as a commentary on the pandemic. The president is also a character whose many faults and shortcomings Streep delighted in bringing to life, and she credits McKay for giving her and her co-stars the latitude to indulge in awfulness.As Streep explained in a recent phone interview, “He never lost heart or confidence in this vision that he had for this thing, which was to make an atmosphere as free as possible for everybody — just go nuts and do what you want. But with a deadly serious intent.”Here, Streep and McKay explained the steps they followed to put President Orlean in the Oval Office.Create a back story.Based on what she’d read in McKay’s screenplay, Streep said she was already envisioning how President Orlean could have won office. “You could imagine a group of various miscreants was pulled together, and she was the least bad of a lot of other candidates that they could have put out there,” Streep said, adding that she thought of Orlean “as someone whose elderly husband had a lot of money, and she got rid of him, and it was in California so she got half. She had no real agenda except to have and retain power, and when she got there, she just realized that the job was pretty easy.”McKay said that in naming the character, he was thinking of New Orleans — “It’s a fun city, but it’s kind of in jeopardy” — and not the fact that Streep played the author Susan Orlean in “Adaptation.” (The notion that he manifested Streep in the role by naming it for her, McKay said, is “definitely not the case.”)Draw on real-life inspiration.McKay said he thought of President Orlean as “a goulash” of recent chief executives. That meant “the self-serving con man aspects of the last president, the dangerous inexperience of George W. Bush, the slick polish of Bill Clinton, the celebrity of Barack Obama and the coziness with big money,” McKay said. Another inspiration was the finance expert Suze Orman, whom McKay described as “a brash populist with a strong fashion statement.”To that recipe, Streep said she added a dash of the “Real Housewives,” whose televised squabbles often play in her house when her daughters come to visit. Though Streep won an Oscar for playing Margaret Thatcher in “The Iron Lady,” she said that performance was instructive only up to a point. Thatcher, she said, “wielded a kind of femininity that was intimidating to men, and part of her power was how she could pull it together — it was very specific to the ladder she climbed there.” Orlean, she said, is “more of our time — algorithmically put together.”Streep on the set. Her look was modeled on that of news anchors.Niko Tavernise/NetflixLook the part.Streep had a hand in devising Orlean’s fashion sensibility, which she said communicated something essential about the character: “So what if she’s 70 years old and dresses like she’s 35?” she explained. “No one told her you can’t be 35 forever.” That meant attire modeled after TV news anchors who, Streep said, “tend to pick these broad swaths of bright, happy colors to put on themselves — no prints, no polka dots or plaids or, God forbid, florals. None of the things that other people wear. Just these power suits and pencil skirts.” It also called for a specific hair regimen: “When I was in high school, you’d set your hair in rollers, then take it out and brush it 100 times,” Streep said. “This is the kind of hair where you take it out of rollers and just leave it like that — the longer the better. And then those are sprayed and crisped and the ends curl out in weird ways. And that’s a thing. It has always escaped me why this was good. So I thought, well, I’m going to try to that — God knows I won’t do it in my real life.”Get ready to face the crowds.All that advance planning may still not fully prepare you for the demands of the presidency, as Streep discovered on her first day of shooting. She had spent several weeks in isolation, as screen actors have been required to do during the pandemic. Then, on the appointed day, she said, “I bundled up in my big down coat, put the dog in the back of my car, drove through a snowstorm to Worcester, Mass., and got out at a stadium and parked.” Once there, Streep said, “They tried to turn me away at several points to get into the set. I said no, I’m in it.” After getting into hair, makeup and costume, Streep took to the stage where she saw her face on a Jumbotron and heard the delayed echo of her voice as she spoke to a crowd of several hundred extras. “And I just lost it,” she said. “I thought, well, I clearly have to retire. I can’t do this. I actually can’t do this. It was really a crisis of confidence.” Needless to say, Streep did find her bearings, but, she said, “it took a while.”Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More