Winning Time Boss Previews Season 2's Epic Lakers-Celtics Rivalry And Magic's Bitter Feud With His Coach
The "Showtime" Lakers of the 1980s were known for their fast-break style, and HBO's Winning Time is off and running, too.
The docudrama that chronicles Magic Johnson and the L.A. Lakers basketball dynasty returns for Season 2 this Sunday (9/8c), and while the first season covered just the 1979-80 NBA season — when Magic and new Lakers owner Jerry Buss won their first title — Season 2 jumps ahead to cover the next four seasons in Lakers history. That takes us right into the heart of the Lakers' legendary rivalry with the Boston Celtics, with the two teams meeting three times in the NBA Finals in the '80s and combining for eight championships.
So why speed up the tempo? "That first season is so packed because it is the sort of origin story of everything," showrunner Max Borenstein tells TVLine. "It's really this Cinderella year, and one of the great Cinderella years in all of sports." After that was established, "we then started to look at, 'OK, what's the next beat in this epic?'" So Season 2's story "is: How does the winner go from being the flash in the pan to becoming the burgeoning dynasty that we know they became? And that arc is about facing their rivals." Now that the Lakers are reigning champs and Magic's face is on the cover of magazines, "the stakes get far higher," Borenstein hints. "The odds are far longer that a team goes on to [win it all] again, because everyone's got their sights set on you, because egos get in the way." So instead of taking the series one NBA season at a time, "we really are letting the story drive how we're going to shape the narrative."
That narrative gives Magic a perfect antagonist in the form of Celtics great Larry Bird, who becomes a superstar in his own right as well as a constant thorn in Magic's side. "Everybody who knows about Magic Johnson and Larry Bird knows that they are the kind of rivals without whom the other wouldn't have been as great. They drove one another," Borenstein explains. "In our first season, we were only able to introduce Bird as the sort of heavy, from the outside looking in." But Season 2 gave the writers a chance "to really get in his head and just start to complicate things for the audience. Because people are going to come in identifying with Magic. But the more you learn about Larry Bird as a human being, the more difficult it becomes to see him as anything other than an equally empathetic, compelling hero."
Magic's sterling reputation takes a hit in Season 2, too, when he gets embroiled in a very public power struggle with Lakers coach Paul Westhead. Magic was "the first superstar to really get into a situation with a coach where it became clear to him that he had more leverage and more power than the coach. That's something that nowadays we take for granted," Borenstein points out. "It came with blowback. It also cut against the style and the personality of a guy who wants to be loved, who feeds off the affection of his teammates, the affection of the fans." Plus, Season 2 shows how "some of that success goes to Paul's head" and "gets in the way of his ability to coach his stars," the EP adds. "It's really one of the great Shakespearean arcs in sports, and we've been dying to get there since the first season."
Of course, basketball fans know how this story ends, but Borenstein and his writers are striving to go beyond just the facts and statistics of the Lakers' ascent to NBA glory. "For us, the joy of telling the story is not just going beat for beat through what happened, because we can find that out on Wikipedia. It's really digging into the emotional drama of what it is to be a celebrity athlete, the work that gets put in, the struggle, the strain on your family, the strain on your personal relationships. All that stuff that goes into the making of the legends is really the subject matter of this show."
What are you hoping to see in Season 2? Dribble your way down to the comments and make your voice heard.