The
best-selling documentaries about Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls
of the 1990s made a lot of noise as entertainment, but journalistic
compromises mean it's little more than long-lasting branded content.
Shortly after ESPN won its first-ever Oscar for Ezra Edelman's documentary," OJ: Made in America", a masterclass on long-form investigative journalism that drew comparisons with Mailer and Caro, the channel announced another series of multi-part documentaries centered on an American sports icon. The Last Dance, a 10-part film produced jointly with Netflix, promised a deep and unvarnished dive into one of the most transformative stars and dynasties in sports history: Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls of the 1990s.
The wait only grew with the release at Christmas of an extensive trailer on glossy that teased new images and a list of interviewed stars - Barack Obama! Justin Timberlake! - with the participation of Jordan himself, who spoke only sparingly about the bulls' imperious reign and their staggering collapse in the two decades since he played. Originally scheduled for release in June at the same time as this year's NBA Finals, ESPN quickly moved the date from the first to April, after the coronavirus pandemic burned the earth in its spring lineup.
As entertainment, it was broadcast in almost every conceivable way. Driven by the narcotic appeal of nostalgia, the clever mix of archival images, news interviews, and the spare-no-expense soundtrack breathes new life into even the most familiar points of Jordan's trajectory, from the early amateur to the larger-than-life symbol, both overexposed and mysterious. He is one of the few American sports threads worthy of such a sprawling web and the episodes have become Sunday night television events throughout the last month, attracting an average of six million viewers on the first six episodes before their international release the next day on Netflix. It turns out that even the opening notes of Sirius by the Alan Parsons Project, the instrumental backdrop of the Bulls' player introductions, and perhaps the Closest American analog to the All Blacks' haka for a stunning pre-match staging, are still enough to cause shivers after all these years.
But like journalism, unfortunately, The Last Dance borders on professional misconduct. What ESPN declined to mention during its breathless promotional blitz is that Jordan's own production company, Jump, is among the co-producers behind the project - a fact you wouldn't recognize from reading the end credits, which were notably omitted. Among the few to grasp this detail amid the delirious and enthusiastic public reception for the film is the venerable American documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, who described the arrangement as "the opposite direction of where we need to go" to the Wall Street Journal this week. "If you have an influence on the very fact that the film is made, it means that some aspects that you don't necessarily want to be in it won't be, period," Burns said. "And that's not how you do good journalism ... and that's certainly not how you make the right story, my business.
The fact that ESPN did not disclose what amounts to Jordan's preservation of the final edit of his film might not be considered an ethical stumbling block if it had been presented as a point of view in the spirit, for example, of The Kid, Stays in the Picture of 2002, which leaves it to the viewer to analyze the truth of Robert Evans' unreliable narrator. But The Last Dance has instead been presented as a definitive narrative, even if it is compromised by the flaws and prejudices inherent in any authorized biography, with little regard for those who are considered villains (even if they are not alive to give their version).
Of course, concessions were needed for the project to even start. The more than 500 hours of behind-the-scenes footage from Jordan's final season with the Bulls, which form the narrative backbone of The Last Dance, came about only because of a pact between the star and the NBA's internal entertainment division: that all of this could only be used with his explicit consent. As Commissioner Adam Silver reminded (who else?) ESPN: "Our agreement will be that none of us will be able to use these images without the other's permission."
After many refusals on many grounds for many years, Jordan finally accepted a proposal in 2016. (The fact that he would have given the green light literally a few days after LeBron James' famous victory in the NBA Finals against the Golden State Warriors, which reignited Jordan's cross-cultural debate against LeBron for good, may have been a happy coincidence).
The choice between the thinly veiled hagiography of The Last Dance and the total absence of film is easy. Jordan's almost psychopathic competitive vein, a kind of Daniel Plainview in the upper echelons, has been documented exhaustively, but to see a 57-year-old man reflect on this image and weigh in on decades-old scores is undeniably an exciting theatre. Nevertheless, allowing the subject to have a final review and editorial control ensures that The Last Dance's most ambitious promises can never be kept.
What has been presented as a chronicle of warts and everything, does not entirely ignore the less pleasant elements of Jordan's legacy, long the fodder of whispering networks and urban legend, but he addresses them entirely according to his terms. Stories about his compulsive gambling habits and tyrannical inclinations towards teammates may seem problematic at first, but end up seeming forgivable. For the first time, Jordan opens up about his infamous apoliticism -"Republicans also buy sneakers" - a trait that hasn't aged particularly well in the context of the resurgence of athlete activism after Kaepernick - but the filmmakers apparently didn't think it was worth talking to Craig Hodges, a key contributor on the first two of the six teams in the Jordan Championship that has been among its most vocal critics on the subject - a glaring omission given the more than 100 people in orbit from Jordan who were interviewed. We have the unwavering feeling of not receiving the right dose of drugs, but of seeing Jordan as it wants to be seen.
This is less an indictment of filmmakers than a commentary on our media climate. While we'd like to see this material in the hands of a Pennebaker, Burns or Asif Kapadia, it's simply a failure at a time when sports and entertainment titans can bypass traditional channels to control storytelling through their own production companies or friendly platforms like the Players' Tribune, a trend that Jordan has a trend, it must be said, was decades ahead of schedule. And ESPN, a rights holder who pays billions of dollars each year to broadcast NBA games, isn't the only culprit for the blurring of journalism and entertainment: Look no further than Verhoeven's pantomime proposed to Fox News or Jeff Zucker's work at CNN, where the promos for presidential debates, formerly broadcast in U.S. salons as a public service, would not feel displaced on Monday night.
In other words, The Last Dance might look like a missed opportunity if there was still an opportunity to miss. This may not be the prestige journalism for which ESPN would be happy to be mistakenly taken, but in the new kind of long format branded content, you could do much worse.
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