The new season of the hit HBO series Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty is right around the corner. HBO recently announced that Season 2 of the basketball series will premiere on Sunday, Aug. 6 at 9 p.m. ET on the network and will be available to stream on Max. A teaser trailer was also released by HBO, which shows the challenges the Los Angeles Lakers have to deal with after winning the NBA Championship in 1980.
“Season two continues to explore the professional and personal lives of the 1980s Los Angeles Lakers,” the official synopsis states. “This season hones in on the period just after the Finals in 1980 through 1984, culminating in the first professional rematch of the era’s greatest stars: Magic Johnson and Larry Bird.”
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The first season of Winning Time premiered in March of last year and earned a lot of praise from critics and fans. The show earned multiple award nominations and recently won the Satellite Award for Best Ensemble: Television. The cast of Winning Time includes. John C. Reilly, Quincy Isaiah, Adrien Brody, Jason Clarke, Gaby Hoffmann, Jason Segel, Hadley Robinson, DeVaughn Nixon, Solomon Hughes, 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, with Michael Chiklis and Rob Morgan.
Last year, Winning Time creator Max Borenstein spoke to Vanity Fair about the pacing of the series since the show talks about the Lakers in the 1980s. “I don’t know if we’ll have 10 seasons, but I know how many seasons it should be in order to do it right,” Borenstein said. “Precisely because people can go to the Wikipedia page and find out ‘what happened,’ there’s no point in doing a show that just recreates those events and adds a few jokes and takes you through the decade in a couple years. By definition, if you’re spending your real estate on moving that quickly through time, you can’t possibly go deep into any characters or the experience, and those are the things that were more exciting and interesting for me.”
Borenstein also talked about the backlash the show has received from Lakers legends like Jerry West and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. “We remain enormous fans of the era, of all of these characters and everything these people have accomplished,” he said. “We made this from a place of great appreciation, affection, and fandom. And beyond that, we’ve made it with a tremendous amount of research. We spent three years reading every book, watching every interview. One of the great benefits of telling a story about people who’ve lived their lives in the public eye is that, in many cases, they’ve written their own stories.”
