Right now, 10 hours of old playoff basketball should probably be broadcast with a trigger warning. Ten hours of Michael Jordan-era Chicago Bulls playoff basketball should probably come with a chaplain. For “The Last Dance” is 10 hours of all-time postseason sports. The documentary is ostensibly about the season that culminated in the team’s historic sixth and final N.B.A. championship title, in 1998, led by Jordan, Scottie Pippen and Phil Jackson, the coach. That’s a story that may not require a show that runs about as long as Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Ten Commandments parable, “The Decalogue.” But what else are you doing?

Moreover, this is a team whose personalities, personal dramas and feats warrant just this sort of excess. It’s a team that inspired its own commandments: Thou shall not doubt. Jordan’s 15 seasons of brilliance, cunning, ruthlessness, volition, perfectionism and artistry render him impervious to overstatement. He essentialized the sneaker as casual wear and luxury item. He made cause-free celebrity — cause-free black celebrity, no less — seem viable, preferable to having to mean all things to all people. One size had to fit all. Few team players had ever became as rock-star, movie-star famous and with nary a scandal the way Jordan had — almost exclusively through athletic supremacy. There was basketball Jordan and Air Jordan. No athlete anywhere will ever have a mid-motion logo as triumphantly hieroglyphic as his, the silhouette as sentence.

[Read more on the death of Michael Jordan’s father, James Jordan.]

In Pippen, Jordan had the greatest wingman ever; in Rodman, the most mercurial, most formidable Dennis. In Jackson, among the least likely of masterminds. How did the team’s core last so long? How’d it keep winning so big, bigger, biggest? Over and over, the series reminds you how many times things came yea close to falling apart. And, remarkably, even then, the pieces were reassembled and reconfigured for further dominance.