Moving up the June premiere of The Last Dance, ESPN’s sweatily anticipated, years-in-the-making treatise on Michael Jordan and the ‘98 Bulls, for which clamoring reached a fever pitch at the onset of social distancing measures, was not as simple as pressing a “play” button a couple months early.
“Clearly we had to accelerate the workflow and the output of the work,” Jason Hehir, the director of the documentary, told Sports Illustrated. Even with Hehir and his team ramping up their already Herculean effort to finish editing the 10-hour behemoth, they were still working on the final episode of the series as recently as the second week of April—with the documentary scheduled to debut on April 19.