L’EQUIPE TV – TUESDAY SEPTEMBER 6 AT 9 PM – DOCUMENTARY SERIES
“My name is Michael Jordan, I played for the Chicago Bulls from 1984 to 1998.” Thus begins The Last Dance (“The Last Dance”), an event documentary series produced by Netflix and the American channel ESPN in 2020, and rebroadcast from tonight on L’Equipe TV, the sports daily channel The Team.
For those – probably quite rare – to whom the name of Michael Jordan evokes absolutely nothing, this series of ten episodes (broadcast two each week) traces the last season of this star player of the National Basketball Association (NBA) , at the end of the 1990s, and took the opportunity to look back on his long career. For everyone else, whether they care about the orange ball or not, The Last Dance is a rare exercise: the stripping of a king.
His career, his statistics, the empire he created, everything has already been written about the former number 23 of the Chicago Bulls. And yet, the series has the advantage of exposing a star who has become bigger than his sport. For no other living sportsman, two former American presidents (Barack Obama and Bill Clinton) would have agreed to submit to the documentary game.
Obsessed with winning
Apart from them, the director, Jason Hehir, interviewed all the actors of the time at length to try to approach the man behind the legend. No less than ninety people were interviewed during the documentary, including other basketball icons, such as Magic Johnson, Dennis Rodman, Kobe Bryant…
At a time when images and videos saturate social networks, The Last Dance offers an unprecedented dive behind the scenes of a team, at a time when reality TV had not yet made the exercise familiar. During the 1997-1998 season, from the start of pre-season preparation, the Chicago Bulls offered a film crew almost total access to their daily lives.
Athlete who has always held – almost sickly – away from positions that risk harming his concentration (as well as his business), Michael Jordan had drawn the image of an ideal son-in-law, solely focused on sport. . And if many testimonies have since shaken the myth, The Last Dance gives for the first time to see the “real” Jordan: a sickly competitor, a “screaming devil”, obsessed with victory. “ It was unstoppable and he really carried our team.”said his teammate Scottie Pipen in 1996.
Jordan and his lawyers of course exercised a right of inspection on the final assembly. And the first episodes of the documentary series do not suggest a trick question. But after these two years of confinement, where sports fans have often only had to gnaw on the replays of prestigious matches, this invitation to enter “the last dance” cannot be refused.
The Last Dance, directed by Jason Hehir (EU, 2020, 10 × 50 min). TV Team
