Legacy: The True Story of the LA Lakers

Legacy starts strong and only gets stronger. It’s a multi-generational family dynasty real-life drama far more riveting than any dramatized version.

The result is a series peppered with highlights but that plays like too much of a licensed product, weighted down with Buss family reminiscing.

Legacy is pretty decent when it’s the story of a tension-plagued family passive-aggressively, and eventually active-aggressively, competing for the family business — like Succession if Kendall Roy were an executive producer, with a fun, star-studded basketball story in the background.

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 this documentary series exhaustively hits every narrative beat to have happened to the Buss family without pushing for the deeper insight.

There’s some behind-the-scenes stories that will be entertaining to hardcore fans. Largely, though, there’s a stiffness to the proceedings, a conscious attempt either not to be Winning Time or to directly rebut it. ... Legacy seems so determined to avoid controversial subjects that it comes off dry as a result; even the show’s willingness to discuss the Buss family’s internal struggles over control of the team feels somewhat contrived.