In the HBO season 2 finale Buying Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty, Celtics owner Red Auerbach (Michael Chiklis) has the last laugh. Amid a haze of cigar smoke and a flurry of champagne showers, Red, holding up the freshly minted Larry O’Brien trophy, stares directly into the camera – and into the very soul of Los Angeles Lakers owner Jerry Buss (John C. Reilly) – and proclaims, “Leave the dynasties to us.”
In an ironic twist of fate, Buying Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty ends with the Celtics adding another championship banner to the rafters of Boston Garden and the birth of “Tragic” Johnson. On Sunday night, HBO announced that the episode would also serve as the series finale. Winning time concludes its run after just two television seasons and just two titles for the Showtime Lakers in the series out of their eventual five. Even with its rich and glamorous subject matter, the series failed to attract a large enough audience to merit a renewal, partly because of the series’ shortcomings and partly because of poor timing. So, even if it is not The ending co-creators Max Borenstein and Jim Hecht initially envisioned, one of the final, lasting images of Winning time will be a defeated Magic Johnson (Quincy Isaiah), sitting on the floor of a locker room shower after losing to Larry Bird (Sean Patrick Small) and the Celtics in the 1984 NBA Finals.
The seven-episode second season of Winning time had its ups and downs, but it delivered a gripping finale that captured one of the most iconic NBA Finals of all time. The narrative of the entire season revolves around the fateful playoff game between the Lakers and Celtics in 1984; The first episode begins with Buss’ team attempting to quickly escape from the rabid Boston crowd after stealing the first game before the series flashes back to four years earlier, essentially picking up where the first season s ‘is finished. The following story chronicles the Lakers’ growing pains as Magic led the team to the 1980 title after Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (Solomon Hughes) went down with an injury.
During the first six installments of the season, Winning time divided its attention between several storylines, including power struggles between Lakers teammates and coaches, Magic’s growing ego, a budding romance that ends in a trial for Buss, the still-dysfunctional relationship between Jerry and his children, the rise of head coach Pat. Riley and the origins of Bird. It is a lot of narrative ground to cover in a more limited window than that offered to the series during its first season, which consisted of 10 episodes and focused on the 1979-80 NBA season alone. As a result, Season 2 often felt rushed, as four years passed at a sometimes arbitrary pace and the story was scattered among too many characters.
However, while the stage is set for the 1984 finale, the season finale slows its pace considerably. Months have passed between scenes from previous episodes, but the finale’s nearly hour-long runtime focuses on a single series of seven matches. There are more basketball scenes than ever as the series recreates the most famous moments of hardwood battles, with rigorous attention to detail. The magic freezes at the end of the second game with the clock running down. The clothesline in Game 4. The torrid Game 5 “Heat Game” in Boston. The riot that followed Game 7.
As memorable as the match was, the 1984 final is a strange and unfortunate farewell to a spectacle that was clearly designed to last longer. (After all, the series called Winning time now ends in a bitter loss to the Celtics.) Character arcs and storylines are interrupted as a rather unexpected montage closes the finale to summarize what happened to key teams and characters in the aftermath of the 1983 season- 84 – in 13 slides which lasted almost two minutes. Some of the season’s tensest subplots, like Magic and Cookie’s (Tamera Tomakili) beleaguered romance, seem even more frustrating in hindsight, knowing they’ll never have satisfying on-screen conclusions. As Riley (Adrien Brody) tells his players in a final, impassioned speech before their Game 7 matchup, they have “unfinished business” in Boston. Unfortunately, it will stay that way for these fictional Lakers and the many characters whose lives revolve around them as the series comes to its abrupt end.
Winning time will ultimately be considered a failure for HBO, a series full of untapped potential that could have – and maybe should were a huge success that lasted for many seasons. The series had the star power of a stacked group of actors, including Reilly, Brody, Jason Clarke and, going back to the first season, Wood Harris and Sally Field. It had the emerging talent of Quincy Isaiah and Solomon Hughes, and it even had a fantastic opening credits sequence, a marker of almost every hit HBO series.
Perhaps above all else, it had the brand recognition of the Los Angeles Lakers and HBO coming together for a rare, big-budget sports drama series focusing on one of the most pivotal eras in franchise history. NBA. As evidenced by the lengthy Finals montage, the roadmap was there for tons of drama to exploit in the years to come, including two more Finals fights between the Lakers and Celtics, the growing popularity of the NBA and Magic’s announcement that he had contracted HIV and retired for the first time in 1991, effectively ending the Showtime era.
Although there were many storytelling and pacing issues in Season 2 that could have turned away viewers over time, few people were watching the final season from the beginning. Early August, Deadline reported that audiences dropped 30% in both linear and delayed viewing between the Season 1 and Season 2 premieres. The Entertainment Strategy Guy, a former streaming executive who analyzes the industry under a pseudonym, said noted in a recent streaming report that Winning time had 1.8 million hours streamed during the week of the season 2 premiere, according to Nielsen. This figure represents only a fraction of the streaming hours that other “acquired” TV shows, such as Dragon House Or The last of usreceived on Max, and that’s only slightly higher than the last season of Hard knocks.
Entertainment Strategy Guy, Nielsen
A few factors, besides the inconsistent quality of the show, could have contributed to Winning timeIt’s the lack of audience this season. For one thing, HBO decided to start airing the final episodes in early August, well outside of the NBA and college basketball seasons. (By contrast, Season 1 debuted in early March, just as March Madness was getting underway and before the NBA playoffs.) There’s also the timing of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, which limited promotional opportunities for the series. writers and stars.
And as the Entertainment Strategy Guy wrote to me via email, the show already faced the challenge of airing at a time of year when people generally watch less television. “Historically, July and August are tough months for linear TV (although streaming is seeing an uptick) as people go on vacation and spend time outdoors,” he said. “So it’s not just that the NBA isn’t there to provide natural marketing synergy: TNT can push Winning time during their Thursday matches, for example, but it is also the summer lull. So add no NBA and summer, and being down 30 percent is about right.
The series’ cancellation seemed imminent in recent weeks as reports of low viewership surfaced, particularly when author Jeff Pearlman, who wrote the book Winning time is based on, took to Twitter in mid-August to plead for more eyeballs. “I tell you: the future of ‘Winning Time’ is at stake,” he said. wrote. “We need viewers. Strikes are paralyzing. Please help us spread the word. Season 2 is incredible. But…HBO is big on #s.
According to executive producer Kevin Messick in a recent interview with Vulture, HBO brought the possibility of a cancellation to the series’ creative team in January, and a plan was put in place in case the ax fell. A new scene was filmed in January to serve as an alternate ending – and that’s the one we ended up getting. The season was originally supposed to end with Magic absorbing the Finals loss in the Lakers’ locker room shower, a powerful image that would have set the stage for his impending revenge against Bird and the Celtics in the next playoff showdown .
Instead, the series now ends five days after the championship, and Jerry has his own version of a Lion King–style conversation with his daughter Jeanie (Hadley Robinson) on the Forum floor as he explains that this Lakers kingdom will be his one day and that everything will be fine because “We fucking own this. The final cut showcases all of the success that followed for the Lakers, including more rings and the trade of Jerry West for a young Kobe Bryant, but it all makes for a bittersweet ending to an uneven series that at times touched down. greatness, if only in brief glimpses. (I could have watched an entire season focused solely on Brody’s Pat Riley.)
If Winning time manages to attract a late audience, perhaps helped by recent support from celebrities like the real Jeanie Buss, there’s always a chance the show’s creators could shop it elsewhere. As Messick said Vulture, it is too early to say, but they do not rule out this possibility. “I think the plan is: If the universe wants more Lakers, the universe knows where to reach us.” So far, the universe is not listening enough.
