While it wasn’t shocking that HBO decided to cancel the sports drama television seriesWinning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynastyafter two seasons, given the show’s hefty cost and lagging ratings, the timing was surprising, as the cancelation decision was announced almost immediately after the network aired the show’s second-season finale, and now series-ending episode, last Sunday night.
The awkward timing of the show’s cancelation was highlighted by the incompleteness of the now series-ending episode, which was originally supposed to end with Los Angeles Lakers star Magic Johnson experiencing utter dejection following his team’s heartbreaking loss to rival Larry Bird’s Boston Celtics team in the1984 NBA Finals seriesbut was amended by the show’s production team to include an additional scene between Lakers owner Jerry Buss and daughter Jeanie and a closing montage that reveals the present-day status of all the show’s principal characters.
However, while the original ending would have been entirely fitting as a precursor to the beginning of a third season, especially since the Lakers beat the Celtics in the 1985 NBA Finals series, for a series finale, this ending feels decidedly unsatisfying and makes the overall trajectory of the series seem rather pointless.
No Three-Peat
Winning Time, whichpremiered on HBOon July 30, 2025, was intended to document the Showtime era of the Los Angeles Lakers basketball team throughout the 1980s when the Lakers won five NBA titles, led by superstar players Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Magic Johnson.
However, while the show’s ten-episode first season encompassed the team’s 1979-1980 season, which culminated in the Showtime era’s first NBA title and also marked Lakers owner Jerry Buss’s first season as the team’s owner and Magic Johnson’s rookie season, the show’s condensed seven-episode second season encompasses four years, between 1980 and 1984, and ends with the Lakers’ aforementioned loss to the Boston Celtics in the 1984 NBA Finals series.
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Indeed, there is a direct correlation between the show’s increasingly truncated format and trajectory and the show’s ratings, which crested toward the end of the show’s first season, as the first-season finale indeed stands as the show’s highest-rated episode but plummeted at the start of the second season.
Moreover, as the show’s production team was, early in the show’s second season, notified by HBO thatWinning Timewas unlikely to be renewed for a third season if the show’s ratings didn’t show marked improvement, the show’s narrative became accelerated to the point of seeming rushed, as embodied by the series finale’s hastily-assembled closing montage, which essentially reduces a decade’s worth, and undoubtedly several season’s worth, of events to a crawl of images.
The Fast Break Fizzled
As the pilot episode ofWinning Time, which was directed by Adam McKay, opens with the revelation ofMagic Johnson’s HIV diagnosisin 1991, the clear implication was that the show would eventually return to this point in time, ostensibly in the show’s final episode.
However, this is just one of several major subplots that are left forever unresolved within the now-canceled series, which ended without having dramatized Magic Johnson’s ascendance to superstardom throughout the 1980s, as embodied by the revenge that Johnson and his Los Angeles Lakers team, got against Larry Bird’s Boston Celtics in the 1985 NBA Finals Series and the Lakers’ title runs in 1987 and 1988.
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Indeed, while it may not have been practical, creatively or financially, forWinning Timeto continue with the deliberate narrative structure of the show’s first season and document the period between 1981 and 1991 in at least five or six additional seasons, the lack of resolution that presently exists with the show, as dictated by falling ratings and a reduced number of second-season episodes, makes the shownow seem too incomplete to be able to place the show within any meaningful context.
Moreover, the abbreviated nature of the show’s second and final season clearly indicates that HBO had lost confidence inWinning Time, certainly in terms of the show’s audience appeal, and therefore decided to first limit its financial investment in the show and then bring the series to a precipitous conclusion, regardless of the creative and critical implications of this calculation.
Winning Time Was a Loser for HBO
Despite its high-powered cast, led by John C. Reilly as Los Angeles Lakers owner Jerry Buss, and an impressive production team,Winning Timenever truly lived upto its lofty expectations, as evidenced both by the show’s gradually falling ratings and the fact that the show only received a single Emmy Award nomination, for cinematography, a disappointing result for HBO, which has received 127 Emmy nominations this year.
Moreover, despite the show’s seemingly rich source material, for any sports fan who lived through the Lakers Showtime years in the 1980s,Winning Timeis, despite the show’s undeniable qualities, somewhat anticlimactic, as while the show does indeed contain some revelations about its principal characters, most of the show’s main plot developments have been well documented over the past thirty years, through various articles and books and documentaries.
Indeed,Winning Timedoesn’t seem to be as interesting as a documentary might have been on the same subject, while the 2020 documentary miniseriesThe Last Dance, for example, is fascinating precisely because of the mercurial, secretive aura of its subject, basketball legend Michael Jordan, the main characters inWinning Time, Kareem Abdul-Jabar, the late Jerry Buss, and Magic Johnson, are such transparent figures that there doesn’t seem to be anything thatWinning Timecould have revealed about them that would now seem especially surprising.
