ESPN Michael Jordan documentary The Last Dance is a glorious gift

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...to a sports-deprived public

https://www.vulture.com/2020/04/the-...ocuseries.html

ESPN's 10-part documentary from director Jason Hehir, airing over the next five Sundays, "would have been a great, widely consumed sports-umentary under any circumstances," says Jen Chaney. "But in the odd, trying times Americans and people around the globe are experiencing, it will be revered as a dunk- and drama-filled oasis in a time of drought. The series effectively ticks a number of boxes that audiences desperately need to be 1. It gives people something to watch and, with two hour-long episodes landing every Sunday from this week through May 17, something they can look forward to at the end of every long, long week. 2. It provides content that’s both sports-related and new, albeit driven by looking to the past. 3. It taps into a deeply nostalgic vein for anyone who followed Jordan and the Bulls, or just misses the 1990s...4. It gives everyone a docuseries to experience and discuss that isn’t Tiger King." Chaney adds: "What emerges more and more as the episodes progress is just how intense Jordan is, not just on the court but off of it as well. There was speculation at one time that he had a gambling addiction — The Last Dance covers that, too — but what Jordan admits to being addicted to above all else is winning. What seems to have fueled him more than anything was spite."

ALSO:

• The Last Dance is terrific, but it's not geared toward non-sports fans: "If you come in with even a modicum of enthusiasm, it's a tremendously engaging, ridiculously fun assemblage of spectacular basketball footage and reasonably introspective interviews with almost everybody you'd hope to hear from on the subject," says Daniel Fienberg, contrasting it with ESPN's O.J.: Made in America.
• The Last Dance is not just a TV series -- it's a cultural event: "It is not only an ode to the years in which 'everyone knew Michael Jordan,' as journalist Willow Bay says in the series, but also an attempt to recapture their magic," says Matt Brennan. "As such, while Hehir’s vision is not terribly sophisticated when it comes to race or politics or the long arc of social history, it is extraordinarily perceptive about celebrity — what makes it, what breaks it, what shapes its character and magnitude. Without downplaying Jordan and his teammates’ remarkable prowess, the series tacitly acknowledges that fame, even in sports, is a function of framing, of timing — that what the show of the ‘90s and the team of the ‘90s had in common, as Seinfeld intuited, was first and foremost the ‘90s."
• The Last Dance is not part of ESPN's 30 for 30 series, but it shows 30 for 30's impact on ESPN: "It is worth noting — and almost never pointed out — that The Last Dance is not part of the series at all," says Will Leitch. "It is actually a co-production between ESPN Films and Netflix (it will debut internationally on Netflix April 20). But it’s a mark of the brand’s influence that even though The Last Dance is not a 30 for 30, we instinctively refer to it as one."
• The Last Dance is nearly perfect, but it could've further explored Jordan's avoidance of social activism
• Michael Jordan says The Last Dance will make people think he's a horrible guy
• Why did it take so long for a Michael Jordan documentary to be made?: "As far as why it took so long, I think there's a couple things at work," director Jason Hehir tells EW. "The idea of a 10-hour documentary didn't really exist back in the late '90s when this shot — unless you were Ken Burns. It was only recently that the proliferation of long-form documentary series has come into our pop culture, and that people have a ravenous appetite for these kinds of series. Made in America, the O.J. Simpson doc, broke down that door, and then you have everything up to Tiger King from a few weeks ago that people are willing to sit there and invest time in a story if it's well told. I also think it's no small coincidence that when Michael agreed to finally let this footage be used, we were coming off a 73-win season for the Golden State Warriors and people were openly wondering if that was the greatest team of all time, and not his '96 Bulls, who were 72-10. And it was when LeBron James went back to Cleveland and won a title for the Cavaliers, and people were all of a sudden saying, 'Well, maybe LeBron is the greatest of all time.' Michael doesn't really care to get into those conversations, and he always takes the high road. For a guy with as many accomplishments as Michael, and as prolific a superstar as he is, he's remarkably humble and reticent when it comes to discussing his own greatness. But, knowing the competitor that he is and knowing that fire that still burns inside him, it's tough to imagine that those Warriors teams and the emergence of LeBron as a possible GOAT candidate didn't play a role in his agreement to sit down and tell his story."

The Last Dance is essentially a Michael Jordan-approved extended defense of his career

As Sopan Deb points out, Michael Jordan’s production company, Jump 23, is a partner in the ESPN documentary, which obtained exclusive behind-the-scenes footage of the 1997-98 season with Jordan's approval. "That’s what The Last Dance is: Jordan reminding us who he is, or was, as James’s legacy emerges," says Deb. "Not just as a basketball player, but culturally. Would a documentary about James’s career attract multiple former presidents and A-list celebrities? The series eventually goes over some of the less savory aspects of Jordan’s legacy. But even then, he and several of his defenders are given ample time and space to explain them, or paint them in a more favorable light, such as Jordan’s bullying of Jerry Krause, the Bulls’ general manager, about whom Jordan made cracks about his weight. When teammates are described in unflattering situations, including drug use, Jordan and the documentary team make clear that he steered clear. As Jordan says, he didn’t go to clubs. He didn’t smoke or drink (at the time, he notes, though a glass of what appears to be bourbon sits next to him during some interviews)...That’s by design. The documentary is a product for Jordan. And Jordan doesn’t attach his brand to something that doesn’t benefit him personally."

ALSO:

• ESPN redacted Michael Jordan's misogynist comments when it recently re-published a 1998 Michael Jordan ESPN the Magazine interview: ESPN later restored the interview after Vice pointed out the redaction. "This was a decision made independently by editors who felt that the language used in a quote from 1998 didn’t match today’s sensibilities," an ESPN spokesperson told Vice. "The edits did not alter the themes expressed about Miller. In retrospect, athlete quotes already in the public record should remain so, and we have republished with the original full quote."
• Meet Andy Thompson, an NBA Entertainment producer who convinced the NBA and Michael Jordan to embed a film crew for the 1997-98 season: "In the ’90s, Thompson earned a reputation among the ranks of NBA Entertainment, the league’s film and television arm, as something of a Jordan whisperer," says Jake Malooley. "The younger brother of two-time NBA champion Mychal Thompson (a player Jordan had admired) and himself a former professional basketball player overseas, he had a way of soothing the Bulls’ usually taciturn superstar. His presence would keep MJ in the interview chair a bit longer, move him to pull back the curtain just a little more." It is Thompson's footage that provides the "holy grail" for The Last Dance.
• Jordan's huge baggy suits are the MVP of The Last Dance

[AMackII]

The Last Dance Documentary should be a success for ESPN

[TMC]

The Last Dance is too "Jordanized For Your Protection"

Sunday's third episode of ESPN's 10-part documentary on Michael Jordan and the 1997-98 Chicago Bulls focused on Dennis Rodman, one of the most interesting players in NBA history. It would seem impossible to make Rodman's story rote or dull, says David Roth, but The Last Dance manages to do just that by focusing on Rodman from Jordan's perspective. "It makes sense, both as a business proposition and a storytelling one, to make Michael Jordan the center of The Last Dance: It’s his show, and not just because the never-before-seen footage that’s the series’s ostensible hook was kept locked up for decades at Jordan’s request," says Roth. "But while it’s understandable that (director Jason) Hehir would make Jordan as central to the story as he was to his great Bulls teams, there’s something warped and stunting about telling the stories of that team’s other stars exclusively through how they related to Jordan himself." Roth adds: "The problem is not just that Jordan isn’t a reliable narrator—he’s a pathologically competitive egomaniac, if you’re just joining us—but that he isn’t an especially insightful or curious one. Instead of making Jordan’s version of the story part of a broader whole, Hehir seems dedicated to reverse-engineering a broader and universally agreed-upon truth onto Jordan’s version of things...This dedication to presenting every aspect of the story in a Jordanized For Your Protection way is doubly frustrating because this episode, like previous installments, quickens into something galvanic and fun when it goes from showing to telling. The insistence on hewing to Jordan’s stilted and salty perspective doesn’t add much either to what is already known about Jordan’s career—he was forever finding or inventing haters to smash and was one of the great grudge-cultivators in sports history—or to the story The Last Dance sets out to tell."

ALSO:

• The Last Dance's is flawed for having its history written solely by Michael Jordan himself: "All stories are framed by Jordan’s commentary, and anytime anyone says anything that might upset Jordan, we cut to him growling or rolling his eyes at them," says Will Leitch. "Every talking head, a grouping that includes countless Hall of Famers and NBA immortals, seems to exist in the world of the documentary solely to boost Jordan’s legend. Jordan’s word is taken as absolute scripture, whether it’s about his infamous gambling problem, some of his more notorious off-court exploits or his long-debated reluctance to speak about any world issue that wasn’t explicitly about basketball. To Jordan, the entire world is distraction from his reason for living — winning championships and destroying all who stand in his way, and even many who don’t — and (director Jason) Hehir and company never push harder than that. It’s a telling sign that the film spends almost as much time on an (amusing) Jerry Seinfeld visit to the Bulls locker room as it does on Jordan’s refusal to endorse Harvey Gantt over Jesse Helms in the 1990 North Carolina Senate race."
• Carmen Electra on watching ex Dennis Rodman on The Last Dance: "Seeing Dennis back on the court brought tears to my eyes"
• With the actual NBA season on hold, The Last Dance is the league’s most compelling document of the times
• Michael Jordan is now the subject of a new meme thanks to his bemused expression on The Last Dance
• Episodes 3 and 4 of The Last Dance averaged 5.9 million viewers
• How ESPN made that retro SportsCenter-themed Jordan State Farm ad

Ken Burns hasn't watched The Last Dance, but finds its partnership with Michael Jordan troubling

The NBA great's production company is a partner in the 10-part ESPN documentary, an arrangement Burns tells The Wall Street Journal he would “never, never, never, never” agree to. “I find it the opposite direction of where we need to be going,” says the famed documentarian. Burns adds: “If you are there influencing the very fact of it getting made it means that certain aspects that you don’t necessarily want in aren’t going to be in, period. “And that’s not the way you do good journalism ... and it’s certainly not the way you do good history, my business.”

Ken Burns reached out to The Last Dance director after criticizing the ESPN documentary

Burns told The Wall Street Journal last week he hadn't watched The Last Dance. But Burns criticized the documentary for being made in collaboration with its subject Michael Jordan, adding that it's not "good journalism." The Last Dance director Jason Hehir revealed on The Dan Patrick Show this morning that Burns reached out to clarify his comments. "Ken Burns is one of my idols," Hehir said. "He's got an extraordinary body of work and he's one of the reasons why I wanted to do what I do now so I was a little disappointed that he hadn't seen it yet and he seemed to be casting judgment. He called me the other day, and couldn't have been more gracious, and couldn't have been more classy and said that he apologized not for what he said but that it was taken out of context."

ALSO:

• The Last Dance changes Barack Obama's title from "Former Chicago Resident" to "President Barack Obama"
• Kobe Bryant makes a posthumous appearance on The Last Dance in an interview filmed one week before his death
• Michael Jordan’s late bodyguard John Michael Wozniak, who died in January, stole the show in Episode 6

The Last Dance contains rap music that was "insanely difficult to clear," but the NBA didn't always have a cozy relationship with hip-hop

Rudy Chung, the music supervisor of the ESPN Michael Jordan documentary, considered using current-day rappers like Kendrick Lamar. But he and director Jason Hehir ultimately decided to use the hip-hop music of the Jordan era. The problem is that many hip-hop songs incorporate sampling of other artists' music, so Chung had to jump through many legal hoops. “A lot of these songs are insanely difficult to clear,” he said. “There was so much music we were interested in, but couldn’t get because of sample issues and legal issues.” The documentary, for instance, uses a re-recording of Kool Moe Dee's 1987 hit “How Ya Like Me Now" that doesn't include the impossible-to-clear James Brown sample of the original. As James Gordon points out, "Today, it’s difficult to imagine the N.B.A. without hip-hop. A 1989 documentary on Jordan, he points out, features music from Yanni and Berlin ("Take My Breath Away"). The relationship between hip-hop and the NBA, says Gordon, "has been a gradual evolution from Jordan’s early playing days." As LL Cool J put it: "I think it developed over time. Obviously, you have to be successful enough to come to the attention of people.” ALSO: The Last Dance soundtrack is now available on Spotify.

Bob Costas talks watching himself on The Last Dance and the potential for a Summer Olympics in 2021

Costas says he gets a kick out of watching old clips of when NBC had the rights to the NBA. "But I’m looking at it mostly as just a sports fan and also as someone who appreciates television when it’s done well," says Costas. "And this is done exceptionally well. (The Last Dance director) Jason Hehir was a young producer just in his mid-20s when I first met him and he did pieces for my programs on HBO in the early 2000s. You could tell then that he was gifted and very dedicated." As for the Summer Olympics, Costas says "we have to be overwhelmingly certain that it’s safe," adding: "Let’s bring more than 10,000 athletes from virtually every nation, along with their delegations and all the media and everybody else who shows up from the four corners of the globe with varying levels of health care in their home nations, let’s have them compete at close quarters, sweat on each other, breathe on each other, live together in the Olympic Village, and then let’s send them back to their respective countries and see how that turns out. Talk about a petri dish for causing the whole thing to not just increase, but explode."

The Last Dance shows Michael Jordan displaying a Real Housewives level of pettiness

The ESPN Michael Jordan documentary "has been manna from heaven for sports fans who have nothing to watch, but for those less interested in the trappings of being a champion, the documentary has also provided an unprecedented look at the levels of pettiness basketball players can achieve when they really dedicate themselves," says Shannon Melero. "With all the drama going on behind closed doors and playing out in the media, the Bulls of the 1990s were the perfect model for a figure like Andy Cohen to start a Housewives franchise. Just like any good Housewives series, The Last Dance features its very own queen bee, which is, of course, Michael Jordan. In this particular doc, the story of the Bulls is told almost entirely through Jordan’s perspective, with other people’s thoughts and lives sprinkled about for flavor. The trademark of this domineering figure is to control the narrative and minimize any opposing viewpoints—just ask Bethanny Frankel or Lisa Vanderpump. They also need to exert perpetual control by any means necessary, which Jordan does without breaking a sweat. Throughout the doc, former teammates talk about how Jordan was a bully during practices and borderline verbally abusive...Jordan’s ability to hold a grudge surpasses that of even Teresa Giudice, as was made clear by the Isiah Thomas/handshake debacle of 1991. To this day, Jordan still has not forgiven Thomas, after Thomas and some Pistons players walked off the court following a loss to the Bulls during the Eastern Conference Finals. Even Teresa eventually forgave Danielle Staub for being a backstabbing 'prostitution whore,' or whatever it was Teresa felt like being angry about for a decade."

ALSO:

• The Last Dance archival producer Nina Krstic was tasked with sorting through 500 hours of behind-the-scenes footage of Michael Jordan's 1997-98 season: “I was very lucky that in the early going, the day this was greenlit, Connor Schell, who’s the head of content at ESPN, called me and said, ‘I’m not going to be a backseat driver. But the one thing that I recommend you do is hire Nina Krstic.’ Nina’s talent for digging up this minutiae, I don’t how she does it but she’s literally the best that I’ve ever seen at it,” says director Jason Hehir. “All I know is that if I call her and say, ‘I need a picture of Michael in high school, or I need a sound bite from someone in Oklahoma talking about Dennis Rodman as a college player,’ it doesn’t matter what you say to her. If it exists, she will find it. Without her, this project does not happen the way that it happened.” Krstic, who previously worked on O.J.: Made in America, says of her job: “To begin with, I concentrate on characters. What I like to do is get a sense of how the character arc is going to develop throughout the show. I like to just grab all interviews available for each major character and make it into a watchable, one-hour interview stringout. You can really see a person grow and change and develop in this character stringout, so you get a sense of how the show’s gonna develop."
• The Last Dance producers had plenty of strategies for getting Jordan to open up during their three interview sessions: The three interviews took place in June 2018, May 2019 and December 2019.
• The Last Dance's "Laughing Jordan" joins "Crying Jordan" as a great Michael Jordan meme