‘Winning Time’ Canceled After 2 Troubled Seasons In Another Blow To HBO’s Sunday Night Dominance

Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty, the HBO sports drama following the 1980s Los Angeles Lakers, has officially lost out on a third season.

Series creator Max Borenstein took to X (the platform formerly known as Twitter) last night (Sept. 17), confirming the show’s cancellation.

“Not the ending that we had in mind,” he wrote. “But nothing but gratitude and love.”

Series EP Kevin Messick told Vulture that “there were never any guarantees in today’s marketplace of a subsequent season,” which meant that they had to plan “for the ‘What if’ scenario” of a Season 2 finale also serving as a series finale.

“We got a call from HBO, whom we’ve been partnered with for years,” he told the outlet. “They said, ‘Think about it so that you have the option while you’re still in production to figure out how it might end if, sadly, that was the end of it.’ So we did get a chance to prepare, which we appreciated. But to be clear, we never planned creatively to end at the ’84 finals.”

The series was based on Jeff Pearlman’s book Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley, and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty of the 1980s. On Sept. 6, Pearlman revealed on X that the series was “fighting hard to survive.”

“Viewership keep going up, up, up,” he penned. “But if you want HBO to renew it and keep it going (and not have it fucking end with Boston winning), we need views. Seriously. It’s the best show on TV. But #s matter. #winningtime.”

According to Deadline, the Season 2 finale, which aired Sunday (Sept. 17), garnered 629,000 total views on Max, a significantly lower feat than the 1.6M same-day viewers for the Season 1 finale that aired in May 2022.

Nonetheless, Messick explained to Vulture that he and his production team were debating between two different endings. The ending that they ultimately went with features former Lakers majority owner Jerry Buss (John C. Reilly) and his daughter Jeanie Buss (Hadley Robinson), followed by a montage of the real-life people portrayed in the show and their eventual accomplishments.

The series’ finale was approved by the real-life Jeanie, who “lived through the loss in ’84” documented in Season 2. Messick said that after showing her the ending that aired, “she teared up seeing both the scene with her and her father, and the accomplishments that everybody went on to achieve, including her.”

“I know it’s effective because the person that was in the room where it happened was affected by it,” he added. “But, again, it wasn’t where we wanted to land.”

Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty is streaming on Max.