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In the spring of 2022, Lakers president and controlling owner Jeanie Buss turned on HBO’s Winning Time and was transported back to the start of her career.
The well-received but short-lived series, based on Jeff Pearlman’s book Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley, and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty of the 1980s, traced how her father, Dr. Jerry Buss, bought a floundering NBA franchise and quickly turned it into a world-class operation. It brought back vivid memories for Buss—glimpses at her dad’s brilliant and tempestuous ownership, Magic Johnson’s rise to fame, and her own college-aged education inside a male-dominated front office.
“They really captured my dad,” Buss tells TIME. “But it was very frustrating to not be involved with a project that is basically telling your life story.”
Which is why, a couple years earlier, Buss started sniffing around Hollywood to develop projects herself—first by executive-producing a team docuseries, then looking to develop her own narrative. After decades accruing unique stories and “crazy situations” with her business partner and friend Linda Rambis, she pitched around a television series based on her own glass-breaking experiences running the Lakers. “We would always talk about how it would be a great setting for a television show,” Buss says, likening the pair’s experiences to Lucy and Ethel. It wasn’t until they met with writer and executive producer Mindy Kaling, though, that an idea crystallized. “She saw something in our relationship, in our situation, and was inspired,” she adds.
The long-gestating result is Running Point, a 10-episode Netflix comedy series that centers around Isla Gordon (Kate Hudson), the blonde, battle-tested, and newly-appointed controlling owner of the fictional Los Angeles Waves. The show, written by Kaling, David Stassen, and Ike Barinholz, is a bouncy look at the inside of a flailing NBA organization and covers just about every relationship in Isla’s personal…
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