She was eagerly awaited. It still amazed us, beyond all expectations, with moments of crazy intensity. "The Last Dance", an expression of Phil Jackson, the coach of the legendary Chicago Bulls of the 1990s, to motivate Michael Jordan and his sometimes aging partners during their last season to conquer a 6 th NBA title, achieves audiences stratospheric.
In the United States, the co-producer ESPN channel attracts 6 million viewers every week. And above all, everyone talks about it on social networks and in real life ... It would be even the most "sought after" series in history on Internet engines. In France, Netflix does not communicate audiences, but "The Last Dance", since its launch on Monday April 20, has never left the Top 10 most watched programs on the platform, all genres combined. For a sports documentary in ten episodes about a planetary star who stopped his career more than twenty years ago, it's unheard of.
PODCAST. Highest-paid basketball and sports legend Michael Jordan in Paris
A slice of history
"The Last Dance" is not only about the rise of a sportsman and a legendary team. When Barack Obama, a huge basketball fan and player, testifies to decipher the fact that Jordan refuses to take a political position in an America still marked by racism, we fly at a high level. When an episode tells of Nike's bet, then a brand that is not yet a leader, betting everything on a young NBA player, and creates a shoe with its name, to gradually overtake all its competitors who did not want Jordan, we enters the beginnings of the sneakers culture, these city sneakers. The oldest will remember that in the early 1990s, when the number 23 of the Bulls began his career, putting on tennis to go to work was not trivial. A fashion story? "The Last Dance" is also that.
A series that brings generations together
It’s the chef’s surprise. Teens love it. And not only supporters of LeBron James and NBA stars today, curious to discover the "ancestor" Michael Jordan. All the codes of the series - the emergence of an attitude, a style on and off the floors, the art of punchline, rap, the beginning of interbreeding - go far beyond the sport. The NBA became famous in France in the 1990s. One of the funny moments shows Michael Jordan interviewed in "Nulle Part Ailleurs" by Guillaume Durand on Canal +. The quadras and quinquas rediscover their sleepless nights of the time to see live playoff broadcasts. Their children discover Jordan and his partners as icons of a lifestyle.
Michael Jordan in "Nulle Part Ailleurs" on Canal + (1997)
A tormented hero
We expected a hagiography, an endless clip, an anthology of the three-point baskets of the American basketball superstar. It's quite the opposite. Jordan, who refused access to his house, is interviewed at length on his gray areas, and confronted with striking archive images. Training scenes where the tyrant harasses his partners to raise their level of play, even brutalizing them verbally, even physically. His addiction to gambling, delusional betting for everything and anything, to the point of endangering himself. The tragedy of the death of his father and mentor, murdered on a road in Caroline, his native region, which will lead to the player's first retirement - gone to try his hand in baseball - before his return to the courts 18 months later , has a polar thickness. The almost stolen image of Jordan, collapsing in uncontrollable sobs lying alone in the locker room, after the conquest of the title of return, reveals the vulnerability behind the indestructible shell.
A real group portrait
The quality of a film or a fiction series is often the power of the secondary characters. Here they are fantastic, from Scottie Pippen, the other star in his shadow, player and sometimes sulky, to Phil Jackson, former great player in the hippie era of the NBA, become the hard coach but so human. The series also shows these seven painful years between his arrival at the pros in 1984 and his first title in 1991, the construction of a team.
Finally, the series is broadcast the old fashioned way: two episodes each Monday only, as before. When we waited all week, talking about our favorite series, and what would happen next between the characters. "The Last Dance" is this exceptional fragrance, and we feel both excitement, tension and already a nostalgia for the idea of the final released on Monday. How beautiful the epic of the Bulls was.
