'Being Serena' Is A Sweet, If Incomplete, Picture Of Greatness
You won't find anything terribly surprising in HBO's series about the private side of Serena Williams, at least at first. But what you will find is a willfully pleasing self-portrait.
One useful rule of documentaries or quasi-documentaries is: be suspicious of the ones with voice-overs by their subjects. At the very least, be aware that these subjects are being allowed to frame their own stories, so whatever you see is an autobiography of a kind, an assisted self-portrait. In the case of HBO's , the series is a collaboration between HBO and the content-producing arm IMG, which belongs to the same sprawling talent management empire that helping make a series about Rod Tidwell.) So adjust your expectations accordingly.
