Winning Time Ends Its HBO Run With A Devastating Twist — Did The Tacked-On Epilogue Soften The Blow?
Warning: This post contains spoilers for Sunday's Season 2 finale of Winning Time.
If you ever need a definition of the phrase "the agony of defeat," Winning Time's Season 2 (and now series) finale is a pretty good place to start.
HBO's '80s basketball docudrama ended its two-season run with a serious gut-punch, as Magic and the Lakers came up short against their rivals the Boston Celtics, losing the 1984 NBA Finals in a bruising seven-game battle. The Lakers fought until the bitter end but lost Game 7 on Boston's home court, with Magic and his teammates forced to dodge hordes of Celtic fans as they stormed the court. Jerry Buss had to watch as his nemesis Red Auerbach smiled and held up the championship trophy, and an exhausted and devastated Magic sat alone and stared off in silence in the locker room showers.
It's an extra harsh ending because Winning Time fans won't be able to see the Lakers get redemption; HBO announced on Sunday that it's cancelling the series after two seasons. The finale did soften the blow a bit by adding an epilogue with Jerry Buss and his daughter Jeanie where they toasted to their good fortune and he told her, "It's going to be alright, kid. All of it." It also had a final montage noting that the Lakers went on to beat the Celtics in two of the next three NBA Finals and updating us on where all the key players ended up. (Note: The epilogue and montage were not included in the original version of the finale sent to critics.)
Still, it's a boldly downbeat note to end a season (and a series) on, and executive producer/showrunner Max Borenstein was clearly hoping for a Season 3. In an interview conducted before the show was cancelled, he told TVLine: "You've gotta have a third season now, right?" But he also defended his decision to end the season on such a heavy bummer. Since Winning Time is based on real events, he said, "it's really incumbent on us to make it dramatic and make you feel the feelings of what it was like to live through it moment to moment. To have the loss to the Celtics simply as a prelude to a victory and end with a happy ending the way we ended Season 1, I think, would do a disservice to what really happened and to the drama and the emotion of what a loss at that level is really like."
Sports movies usually end with a triumphant victory, but "in real life, you lose, and then you spend the summer licking your wounds," Borenstein pointed out. "You talk to these guys now, you talk to Jerry West now, [and] the losses they suffer still haunt them because you only had so many bites at that apple, and you've worked your entire life to get there. So our goal is to give that experience as much as possible to our audience so it doesn't simply feel like another notch along the way." He even drew a parallel to an infamously painful moment on Game of Thrones: "We want people to sit with it like the Red Wedding, and go, 'Holy s–t.'"
Winning Time fans won't get to see the Lakers climb back to the NBA mountaintop, but Borenstein and the writers definitely had plans for it. He revealed that "we have a lot of ideas" for a potential Season 3, "but we're taking it a season at a time, and we're hopeful that enough people dig this season to give us the oomph and the energy to get that opportunity." He wouldn't say exactly what a potential Season 3 would've covered, but "there's a ton of great material, so for us, it's going to be about finding the right span of time that's going to be the next arc in this dynasty."
Borenstein alluded to the series' abrupt ending in a post mourning the cancellation on Sunday night: "Not the ending that we had in mind. But nothing but gratitude and love."
The ball is now in your court: Give the finale a grade in our poll, and then hit the comments and tell us if you would've watched a Season 3.