Emmy Voters, Don’t Forget the Worthy Shows That Were Canceled Way Too Soon, Like HBO’s ‘Winning Time’
variety.comMichael Schneider Variety Editor at Large Now, imagine being a critically acclaimed drama on a premium network/streaming hybrid in a season where the drama race is pretty wide open.
You’ve got big stars, high production values and well-known source material. Shoo-in, right? Not if you’ve been canceled. (Cue sad trombone sound effect.) That’s the unfortunate fate of “Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty,” the HBO series executive produced by Adam McKay that continued to earn raves in Season 2 for its heightened, not-quite-accurate-but-entertainingly-close-enough take on the 1980s rise of the “Showtime”-era Los Angeles Lakers. “Winning Time” should be in the awards conversation … but wound up getting canceled in September. “No one wants to leave with Boston winning,” director Salli Richardson-Whitfield jokes, referring to how Season 2 ended with the Lakers’ heartbreaking 1984 NBA Finals loss to the Celtics.
The show added a hastily produced coda with John C. Reilly as Jerry Buss, to give the show a slightly brighter ending. But it was an unfortunate ending to a series that should have still had its biggest moments in front of it. “I have not run into one person who knows that I do this show that wasn’t really stunned and shocked,” Richardson-Whitfield says. “Because they loved it so much, and Adam really set up a very interesting world.
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