Winning Time is Adam McKay’s Ultimate Prototype
In honor of March Madness, a (loosely) basketball themed edition of Cansler Culture.
Happy Thursday everyone! In honor of the first day of March Madness, I decided it would be fitting to send out a (very loosely) basketball-themed edition of Cansler Culture.
Please enjoy.
Winning Time is Adam McKay’s Ultimate Prototype
There are some obvious reasons why you might consider Winning Time the basketball version of The Crown. The new HBO series, which tells the story of the rise of the Los Angeles Lakers in the 1980s, is structured very similarly to The Crown, and reportedly will have a multi-season arc stretching all the way into the 2000s.
The Crown, though, is Peter Morgan’s magnum opus, a clear example of his personal storytelling philosophy, which he perfected after decades of work. There are no real creative risks going on in The Crown. Morgan took his risks years ago, and honed them perfectly for this work.
Winning Time, on the other hand, is less of a magnum opus and more of a prototype, made by a man taking a whole lot of creative risks and mucking up all the conventions and rules of storytelling and filmmaking that we’re all very used to at this point. That man, of course, is Adam McKay, the film director famous for starting out in comedy and then pivoting to drama, and very quickly establishing a signature style with the likes of The Big Short, Vice, and Succession. Winning Time makes it clear, though, that McKay has been holding back on us, and now has finally built up enough good will to go full throttle.
It should be noted that technically, McKay only directed the first episode of Winning Time. However, with two episodes now released, it’s clear that, much like he did on Succession, McKay created a template to follow closely with the first episode. Plus, that first episode alone can tell us so much about McKay's approach to storytelling (at least as it stands in this work).
That approach is an almost complete abandonment of objectivity, real or perceived. In this regard, The Crown makes a great foil, because that is a series that is based on a true story and at the very least dwells in the same realm as the truth. Sure, most of the conflicts are heightened to create drama and some details (maybe a lot of details) have been removed to create a more seamless plot structure, but it is also clear that the show wants you to perceive it as “the truth.”
Winning Time, on the other hand, not only doesn’t expect you to perceive it as objective, but seems to want you to view it as an extreme dramatization and not the truth. That isn’t to say that the story is lying about its “based on a true story”-ness, but rather that McKay and the show’s creators aren’t very interested in pretending to be a wholly true account of history. McKay makes that very clear with his directorial choices, which often over-emphasize subjectivity and the emotionality of the story over the details of history.
One way this is clear is in the show’s choice of narrator, by which I mean the show’s lack of choice. Every recurring character at some point or another turns directly to the camera and gives their two cents. Sometimes, multiple characters will narrate within the same scene, almost like they’re all aware that they are in a story and have some obligation to keep it interesting.
McKay also abandons many conventions of film and editing continuity. Some shots have been edited to cut the dead space between sentences, which makes the dialogue both fast-paced and confusing. Other scenes are edited so that we are hearing dialogue over artsy close-up shots or moments from other parts of the same scene that don’t match up. Some sequences even cut together completely unrelated clips. All of these choices are understandably off-putting, since they so clearly abandon the editing conventions that viewers are used to, but they also purposefully evoke levels of emotion that traditional directing and editing wouldn’t, which makes it clear that McKay is more interested in the emotionality of some scenes than the details of what actually happened, which is an unexpected choice for a series based on history.
The filmmaking “look” also lacks continuity. Most of the shots have a grainy, 70’s feel, but then others, randomly, look like they were filmed on a home video camera, which gives the “look” of the series an odd blend of dramatization and documentary, like we’re not supposed to know what actually happened and what didn’t.
To be sure, I’m not convinced that these choices actually work for this show. In fact, it’s almost certainly a bad sign if a show’s directing choices are so distracting that I pay more attention to them than the show’s actual storyline. For this series in particular, I probably would have much preferred a more straightforward filmmaking approach like that on The Crown, and there are certainly many reviewers who are very adamant that McKay’s hubris has essentially ruined a perfectly good script.
That being said, though, I do believe it’s a net good to see a directing style in the mainstream that is so creatively different that it makes viewers, critics, and filmmakers question the old conventions and inspires similar risk-taking. In fact, you can already see some of McKay’s techniques in the works of other creatives, like the series Super Pumped, which premiered earlier this month and incorporates many of McKay’s signature styles. I would not be surprised to see many of the creative risks from Winning Time honed and employed in the works of other directors over the next decade.
In that sense, McKay’s work here is a success in the long-term, even if it “ruins” Winning Time in the short term.
The Only March Madness Bracket You Need
Continuing the loose basketball theme — and in honor of the most attractive D1 basketball coach, who unfortunately did not make the tournament (y’all know who I’m talking about) — I present: The Hot Coach Bracket
And no, I will not be elaborating.
This rules