Hulu’s ‘Legacy’ Feels Like Yet Another Story about the Showtime-Era Lakers: TV Review

variety.com:

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticIn entertainment, as in sports, it’s all about timing.Which makes “Legacy: The True Story of the LA Lakers” a victim of the TV industry’s current interest in its subject matter. (Perhaps that can be blamed on the ’80s Lakers being the most recognizable, and most accessible, team to build a series around in the wake of the smash success of the 2020 Michael Jordan docuseries “The Last Dance.”) Jeanie Buss, the CEO of the NBA’s Lakers, has executive-produced Hulu’s documentary tribute to the team that was already, this year, at the center of Apple TV+’s doc “They Call Me Magic,” about star Magic Johnson, and HBO’s scripted “Winning Time,” about her late father Jerry Buss’ stewardship of the team.

This luxuriously slow-paced 10-part series begins in the “Showtime” era — during which Buss, who purchased the Lakers, along with their then-home court the Forum, in 1979 — leveraged his team’s location and his flair for drama to forge a more purely entertaining kind of sports.

It’s a story that has certain noteworthy elements and that certainly has memorable personalities; Johnson is a welcome on-camera presence here.

But director Antoine Fuqua, gifted though he is, simply cannot get around the fact that elements of this story are ones we have by now seen before, either in a more tightly focused way, as in the Johnson documentary, or with (for better or worse) more verve, as on “Winning Time.”And even if other takes on this story didn’t exist, one wonders just how novel the Showtime story really is.