If you’re a fan of basketball, the stories and characters in Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty (Sky Atlantic) will be familiar. For the rest of us, it’s a bracing introduction. The series begins in 1979, when self-made businessman Jerry Buss decides to buy the Los Angeles Lakers. That same year, they draft a player called Magic Johnson. Together, they will transform the team’s fortunes.

There are many ways to tell this story, from a creative point of view. Executive producer Adam McKay, who has directed the first episode, has opted to throw everything at it. The result is a show that leaves you feeling vaguely uncomfortable – as if you’ve stuffed your face with junk food and a bucket of fizzy pop.

Characters constantly address the audience directly and with a knowing wink. Some of the scenes are shot with a grainy aesthetic reminiscent of 1970s TV, but others are not, and we switch constantly from one to another with no rhyme or reason. There are smart-alec captions all over the place: when Buss’s business partner, Frank Mariani, is introduced, his name pops up on screen accompanied by the explainer “has acid reflux”. The show is more pleased with itself than McKay’s last work, the climate-change satire Don’t Look Up.

It’s a shame, because there is some good stuff here. John C Reilly has a ball as Buss, the kind of man who wakes up in the Playboy Mansion, blow-dries his chest hair, and orders a rum and coke at board meetings. Reilly draws an affectionate portrait of Buss as a sleazeball with a heart of gold and a sharp business brain. If all the breaking-the-fourth wall stuff had been confined to him, it could have worked.

Quincy Isaiah, a newcomer blessed for this part by being very tall, has a much straighter role as Johnson: the son of hard-working parents from Lansing, Michigan, who soon got used to the superstar lifestyle. And when it comes to the other characters, there is no light and shade. The outgoing Lakers owner is a one-dimensional villain; head coach Jerry West (Jason Clarke) exists in a state of near-homicidal rage (if I was the real-life West, I’d be on the phone to my lawyers).

If only the show had committed either to OTT comedy – the kind of thing Reilly was born to do – or to serious drama (Rob Morgan, as Johnson’s watchful father, brings a rare dignity to his scenes). But McKay’s attention is on the flashy surface detail rather than the heart of the story.