In Being Serena , a Superstar Athlete Who Is So Much More Than Her Rankings
Serena Williams is one of the world’s greatest athletes. She’s conquered 23 Grand Slam tennis tournaments, won four Olympic gold medals, and broken countless world records. She is a titan of tennis and a force to be reckoned with, on and off the court. Her ascent into the athletic pantheon has been well documented in sports news and documentary projects (the best of which, 2012’s Venus and Serena, followed her and her sister as they battled health problems and media controversies), but a lot can change in just a few years: In HBO’s glossy new five-part docuseries, Being Serena, Williams reveals more than she ever has before, from her surprise pregnancy and harrowing life-threatening delivery to new motherhood, her fairy-tale wedding, and her triumphant return to the sport that made her an icon. It’s a raw, intimate look into the life of a superstar athlete who is so much more than her rankings.
Across its five episodes (only a few of which were made available to reviewers), the series has seemingly unlimited access to its subject, going inside Williams’s hospital delivery room, her wedding, and downtime with her adoring husband, Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian, as they prepare the baby’s closet, work out with their trainer, and idle in the pool in their backyard, the very picture of domestic bliss. Episode one opens with the athlete discovering she is pregnant while competing at the Australian Open, where she triumphs over her sister, Venus (who, for her part, jokes that she’d “like to think it was unfair, because it was two against one”). A seamless pregnancy ends with a Hollywood-worthy cliff-hanger due to an emergency C-section (an especially fraught procedure in this case, because of Williams’s history of blood clots). Episode two begins with the emotional delivery of Williams and Ohanian’s baby, Olympia, followed by Williams’s need for additional emergency surgery, and her battle for her life.
Williams has a heightened sense of self-awareness (likely derived from her career both in the public eye and as a professional athlete, with its requirement of a high level of connectivity between body and mind) and throughout the series, she demonstrates an almost preternatural understanding of her own inner workings: She dreams of her pregnancy before she takes the test confirming it; in the hospital, she predicts a pulmonary embolism before her body gives leave, causing a near-death scare. The remainder of the episode tracks her medical recovery, the introduction of Olympia to the world, her wedding dress fittings, and her first tennis practice postpartum. There’s a certain amount of cognitive dissonance required for the average person to feel a kinship to a person at Serena Williams’s level of fame or success, but the HBO series’ greatest trick may be how it manages to make the greatest female athlete of all time emphatically relatable. Take her new mom woes: Despite having all the resources in the world, she has the same worries as many working mothers about what the effects will have on her child. Subsequent episodes include her wedding to Ohanian, her return to tennis, and her introduction to motherhood.
As for what’s to come for Williams, there’s no doubt that she will be back on the courts winning titles, though that’s not her only goal. She told Vogue at the premiere of Being Serena that her object is “becoming a multi-mom. I have some records I want to break, but having more kids is my goal.” Luckily, she doesn’t have to choose. As Vera Wang said of Williams at the Being Serena premiere, “There’s the woman side and there’s the champion side, and they’re really one in the same.”
Being Serena debuts on Wednesday, May 2, at 10:00 p.m. on HBO.
