Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty, HBO’s boisterous drama about the Los Angeles Lakers’ Showtime era in the ’80s, was prematurely killed on Sunday, a cancellation so ignominious that it’s hard not to feel bad for the people that made it. It had been a long time coming, in a sense; ratings, while never very high from the start, were reportedly even worse for the second season, despite the fondness that the show’s audience (whatever its size) felt for its stars, writers, and creators. The reorganization of HBO into Max—after the merger of parent companies WarnerMedia and Discovery—may have contributed, along with a new corporate strategy aimed at cutting costs and stripping productions for parts and tax write-offs. The situation wasn’t helped by the lack of marketing and promotion surrounding the series; the ongoing writers and actors strike meant that Jeff Pearlman, the author of the book it was based on, was left alone to appeal to audiences to please, please, please watch the show and save it from cancellation. It didn’t work.
So it goes. But by ending on the Lakers’ loss to the Boston Celtics in 1984, Winning Time is effectively a prequel for a show about the ’80s that will now never be made. Portraying only the first two of the Showtime era’s five championship seasons would be a bit like if The Crown had ended at the Suez Crisis, a moment of defeat and setback before most of what actually made Queen Elizabeth II famous had happened. It would be hard to understand why the story was worth telling. After all, a team that wins two championships in four years is a very good team, but it’s hardly a dynasty; Pearlman would probably not have written Showtime, the show’s source material, if that were all that Showtime consisted of, and HBO would certainly not have poured so much money into adapting it.
The second season is also pretty bad. It’s hard to blame the writers or actors for that—William Shakespeare would have struggled if, halfway through the first act of Hamlet, he were told to wrap the whole story in three. Nevertheless, the shortened second season labors so painfully under the show’s impending cancellation, and so awkwardly resolves each storyline (in the only seven episodes it was apparently given, in comparison to the first season’s 10), that it can be downright painful to watch. Characters are simplified into caricatures, plotlines are dropped, and the penultimate episode leaps from one forced and obligatory catharsis to another, each more artificial and unconvincing than the last. When the Celtics finally beat the Lakers in an exhaustingly epic finale, the cruel absurdity of the good guys losing a series that they should have won, at multiple points, is painful mostly because it so clearly isn’t the right ending for the show they were making.
And yet, perversely, I’m glad it was canceled. I’m glad that Winning Time was forced to blow up its premise by losing, and that the showrunners were unable to make the ending they wanted to make (as they’ve made a point of publicly clarifying). By getting canceled, and showing a winning team losing, they accidentally, against their will, made something kind of great: a show about unhappiness, and about what it does to workers to have their labor owned by feckless billionaires.
For the first season of Winning Time, it’s a little too easy to understand why you’re watching the show. It’s a pleasant, forgettable sports series, telling a variety of familiar and satisfying-but-facile underdog stories across 10 episodes of lavish premium content. Will the team’s new owner revolutionize the business of basketball? Will his daughter defeat sexism by inheriting the team from her dad? Will the new coach transform how the game is played, and will the even newer replacement coaches figure out how to keep it all together? Will the rookie star learn from his elders and grow up? Will the veteran rediscover his love of the game? Will various retired stars figure out how to live life after basketball?
Most of all: Will they all, together, become a team? Will they win the big game and become champions, and fix their lives?
We watch to see if they do these things, and we are happy when they do. This is what happens in this genre. At the beginning, our heroes are in disarray, hungry, unsatisfied, and searching; in the season finale—after a variety of challenges through which they learn to transcend their weaknesses and become better, together—they are finally a team. They win the big game. They become champions. They acquire the MacGuffin. It’s over. They are happy.
But what is happiness? What do you do if, after winning the game, you’re unhappy again? Is happiness, as Don Draper once put it, just the moment before you need more happiness? After all, if winning a championship is what you need to be happy, you’re probably going to be unhappy most of the time.
In retrospect, even the first season of the show is haunted by this question. Jerry West won a championship, is universally revered and loved—his silhouette is literally the logo of the NBA—and the show portrays him as the unhappiest man alive, never so despondent as when his team is winning. Celtics general manager Red Auerbach is the show’s great villain because he reminds us of how miserable victory will make you (or how miserable you have to be to win in the first place); Larry Bird is his avatar, a seething cauldron of joyless resentment with serial killer eyes. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is sour and hollow, unfulfilled by having already become one of the greatest players in the history of the game, and even new owner Jerry Buss is self-aware enough to have noticed that every new acquisition and conquest turns to ashes in his mouth. Were it not for Magic Johnson’s irrepressible joy, it might be hard not to notice that everyone involved with Lakers basketball seems to be made pretty miserable by it.
In this sense, Johnson has to be at the center of the show because his infectious, impossible-to-explain happiness is the great problem the show struggles to solve. Even his father doesn’t understand it. It’s magic; as he explains, as baffled as anyone else, his son was always just like that. But if he was so happy even before he wins the big game—always smiling, always joyful—then what actually is the point of winning in the first place?
Indeed, the irony of the second season is that Johnson is much less happy after winning than he was in Season 1. There are two kinds of unhappy people, we might extrapolate: those who believe they can become happy and those who know they never will be. But while the first season was fun to watch because it focused on the first kind of unhappy people—those whose unhappiness was only temporary because Winning Time had only just started—the second season is a much darker story, because winning turns out to accomplish so little.
Although the raw material was there in the first season, the narrative arc was too conventional, too pleasant, to really dig into any of this. The show has to work hard to frame as underdogs a team with the No. 1 draft pick, the greatest player of all time, and an owner with bottomless pockets—going so far as to redefine success such that anything but winning a championship is what John C. Reilly’s Jerry Buss, at one point, calls a “losing season”—but what we watched last year was a simple, satisfying, and perfectly pleasant sports movie. They win, and when they do, we feel good. They made a show, and we enjoyed it.
It gets so much weirder, and more interesting, when the show gets canceled. And it’s worth taking a step back, because the story that Winning Time tells isn’t just that of some basketball team. It’s a show made in Hollywood, literally, about a group of people making a show in Hollywood. The Showtime era of the Los Angeles Lakers famously transformed the NBA’s place in the culture, making televised basketball into must-see TV. That’s why Magic Johnson is the focus, and Jerry Buss, the visionary showrunner: No one could score points and win games like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, but people didn’t pack the stands and tune in until Buss pioneered the Laker Girls, celebrities sitting courtside, and a team with a flashier, flamboyant style of play. And so, alongside the story of a team playing a game, Winning Time also tells the story of the owner who cast, financed, packaged, and profits from those players’ show.
For the first season, capital and labor are all on the same team, working happily in tandem to make their family business succeed. Everyone wins; everyone profits. But what makes the show’s cancellation so wonderfully, perfectly tragic is that the second season, on multiple levels, is about what happens after the cracks start to show. Winning Time’s creators, Max Borenstein and Jim Hecht, took their patron’s almost bottomless dollars and built a franchise out of the best material, the best actors, and the best production, and … they lost. The fans didn’t watch it. They built a great show, but the owners fired them.
What if you build it and they don’t come? Sports movies don’t always ask that question. They more often tell the story of how the good guys win, how winning is enough, and how winning makes you feel good. And we do feel good when Rocky goes the distance or when the Hoosiers win; we remember the Titans because they won the big game and when Rudy gets to play, he sacks the quarterback. Even when the Bad News Bears lose, they still win. And if the best sports movies tend to end in melancholy—think Friday Night Lights, A League of Their Own, and Bull Durham—they almost always first give us a cathartic thrill of victory. In that sense, the moral of such movies is that this thrill is what sports is for: Sports is for winning, for greatness, for excellence. Sports offers us a world—unlike ours—that’s fair, a world where, if you work hard enough, if you want it enough, and if you play with clear eyes and a full heart, you can’t lose.
The first season of Winning Time mostly tells that story, in a world where the people who made a show get to write their own destiny and win. But they made the second season in a different world, a crueler world, the world that you and I live in, where no matter how good the product is or how hard you worked, the only people who win are the billionaires who own everything. They thought they were making a show for HBO, a brand synonymous with high-quality “prestige” entertainment; a year later, we watched the (shortened) second season on Max, a brand synonymous with House Hunters and canceling good shows to avoid paying residuals.
In this sense, what more appropriate ending for this show could there be than what we got? In the final scene of the show—after we cut away from a defeated Magic Johnson weeping in the shower—we see the owner and his nepo-baby daughter shrugging off the loss, drinking and listening to music in an arena as bereft of players and fans as a canceled show is of actors, writers, and audience: “You know it’s going to be all right, all of it,” he reassures her. “You know how I know?” “Because we own this,” she answers.
Don’t worry, the show reassures us: The owners will be fine. The players may have lost, and the show may be over, but the value of the property? That has only increased. It will be passed from father to daughter, no matter who wins on the court. The dynasty—the real dynasty—is secure. As the final cards in the closing montage reveal, the protagonists of this story were always the owners. And so, happily ever after: “The team Jerry Buss bought in 1979 was worth more than $1 billion when he died in 2013. His Los Angeles Lakers are now one of the most valuable sports franchises.” We can be similarly reassured that by canceling Winning Time, Warner Bros. Discovery has helped make money for its shareholders.
