Note: This interview was conducted before the SAG-AFTRA strike.
After ending its first season with the Lakers’ climactic victory at the 1980 NBA championships, HBO’s “Winning Time” is back for more, with cocreator Max Borenstein teasing that the team is in for more challenges in Season 2.
“Coming out of the first season, the Lakers are now no longer the underdogs. They won, they had a Cinderella story and now they’re the champions. The moment you’ve had that kind of success, repeating it is the hardest thing in the world,” Borenstein told TheWrap. “Everything comes up against them this year: injuries, internal struggles, egos… and knowing that ultimately they have to face their greatest rival and somehow find a way to come together this time, not just to win a championship but to take down the reigning dynasty of the Celtics. So the stakes are higher this year in that way.
“For us, it felt necessary for Season 2 to be the sort of ‘Empire Strikes Back’ to that first season, so to speak,” he added.
Going into the new season, executive producer Salli Richardson-Whitfield said the team felt more comfortable about the show’s stylistic choices.
“What Adam McKay and [director of photography] Todd Banhazl established and created in the first season, we just built on to it. It’s an amazing style of the show. I think it works. It’s what sells it,” she told TheWrap. “As we move deeper into the ’80s, we change it. Lighting changes just very subtly. But I think that for anything in the second season, you can fall into it and learn what works and what doesn’t and the show has gotten better, I think, from the first season.”
“There’s nothing that really mixes formats on TV the way that we do on this show,” executive producer Kevin Messick added. “[HBO] gave us enough leash with our editors to put it together in a way that feels compelling and new.”
Richardson-Whitfield, who directed episodes 1, 6 and 7 of Season 2, said the biggest challenge was recreating the games that diehard Lakers fans have seen before in a way that is exciting and surprising.
“Obviously, we put in a lot of work. We’re watching footage, we’re looking at that guy three rows up… we want to recreate it as closely as we can, and then we add in the emotional moments and the narrative inside of the game that no one has ever been able to experience before,” she said. “We want to give you the heart of the game and I think that’s what we did well this season.”
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The new season comes as “Winning Time” previously faced criticism from the show’s real-life counterparts, including Jerry West, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Magic Johnson.
“We’ve always done our due diligence with a lot of research,” Borenstein said. “The facts of this story are so beyond belief in many ways and it’s so packed full of extraordinary events that we know already that we have the makings of a great story. Our job is to whittle down and figure out how much we can fit, and how we can bridge between those moments and structure it into our episodes of television… we’re just trying to draw on everything we possibly can to create as balanced and nuanced story and a telling of the story as we possibly can.”
Executive producer Rodney Barnes emphasized that the show’s writing team is “coming from a place of truth, empathy and respect.”
“The blessing is that the Lakers did have a very rough and tumble history, and we don’t have to make anything up. We don’t have to elevate the facts in order to make them interesting, they’re already interesting on their own,” Barnes said. “So it really is just a matter of presenting what really happened and condensing it down into what we needed to be for that hour.”
The series draws from author and sports writer Jeff Pearlman’s book “Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley, and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty of the 1980s,” autobiographies from individuals portrayed in the show and print and video interviews. It also leverages actual footage from Lakers games.
“If there’s rooms where we weren’t in it where it happened, of course, there’s dramatization that happens there,” Messick acknowledged. “But for the most part, the bigger themes, the bigger arcs, the bigger changes and the evolutions for the characters are all based on real life and this season, we thought we’d provide a little bit of our homework to go along with it.”
“Winning Time” stars Quincy Isaiah, Adrien Brody, John C. Reilly, Jason Clarke, Gaby Hoffmann, Jason Segel, Hadley Robinson, DeVaughn Nixon, Solomon Hughes, Sean Patrick Small, Tamera Tomakili, Brett Cullen, Stephen Adly Guirgis, Spencer Garrett, Molly Gordon, Joey Brooks, Delante Desouza, Jimel Atkins, Austin Aaron, McCabe Slye, Thomas Mann, Gillian Jacobs, Michael Chiklis and Rob Morgan.
In addition to McKay, Messick, Borenstein, Barnes and Richardson-Whitfield, the series is executive produced by writer and cocreator Jim Hecht, Scott Stephens and Jason Shuman.
“Winning Time” premieres Sunday night on HBO and Max.
