Chilluns, please believe me when I tell you that once upon a time televised Olympic coverage was a very different animal than it is now.
It was…how to describe it?…very Soviet. But in a good way! Spartan, workmanlike, graceless, no-frills, low tech. Imagine C-Span for elite athletes. They plunked down a few cameras and the proceedings sort of droned on hypnotically. If Mens’ Pairs Platform Diving was on offer, for instance, the coverage simply followed the contestants, all of them — even the guy from Albania — in match order. There was no singling out of stars, no vertiginous swoops between live and taped segments. Sometimes segments were taped, of course, because of global time differences, but one was still treated to that unedited real time effect that always feels so authentic.
And the excitement one found in such un-zhuzhed up proceedings became what one extracted from it with one’s own brain. Certainly there were breakout stars (your Nadia Comanecis and such), but they became breakout stars because their extraordinary performances made them stand out, not because they had been manufactured as stars, coming to the games pre-packaged by NBC, teeth freshly bleached (one suspects) and chests freshly waxed for their official coronation.
But leaving out the steering and the nudging and pre-packaging is a risky strategy. It’s always possible some dolts (which is what NBC seems to think we are) will fail to extract their own excitement and change the channel. To combat that possibility, NBC has turned its prime time Olympic coverage into just another soppily sentimental and preachily politically correct reality show for the women viewers who now outnumber the men. With its endless parade of tear-jerking (but ultimately inspiring!) sidebars, it’s become NBC’s version of ABC’s Dancing with the Stars, another reality show show that works tirelessly to cosset its female viewership.
Meanwhile, some of us still wanly tune in looking for this thing called The Olympic Games: You know “Global Conflicts Put Aside,” “Youth Of The World Together”? That Olympic Games. You won’t find that on NBC. The network wants you to tune in to follow the fortunes and drama, tears, and cheers and hugs of Michael and Gabby and Lily and Missy. Who the hell is Missy? Don’t worry you’re about to find out everything about Missy: what she has for breakfast, what her traumatic adolescence with acne was like and so on.
Watching sports coverage in its unedited state can be hypnotic. If you’re lucky, the fine points begin to reveal themselves. You begin to understand, say, that it was utterly right that Athlete A lost an entire point, because, for instance, he didn’t keep his head down enough in the tuck position of his dive. On Monday night I was just getting into this groove with beach volleyball for heaven’s sake when NBC suddenly cut to a sidebar about the home life of beach volleyball champion Kerri Walsh Jennings and her struggle to combine motherhood (three young kids) with training.
Did I return to the beach volleyball match with new interest once they finally got back to the actual match? Yes, but now it’s all about Kerri Walsh Jennings. Her kids are watching from the sidelines! And there’s her mom! Where’s her husband? Oh, maybe off taking a nap. Geez I don’t blame him.
I resent this diversion of my allegiances and emotions from the global to the personal, the nationalistic and also, it must be said, the commercial. One knows full well that Walsh-Jennings’ next appearance on television will be to hawk laundry detergent (or any other product just as long as she’s allowed to say that XYZ laundry detergent is really all about empowering women). Swimmers Lily and Missy are there for the usual I-just-want-to-fulfill-my-
And it turns out that NBC feels no shame at all about the emotionalizing — and even nationalizing — of the games. If NBC Olympics Chief Marketing Officer John Miler is to be believed they’re full speed ahead with this approach: “The people who watch the Olympics are not particularly sports fans,” Miller said recently. “More women watch the Games than men, and for the women, they’re less interested in the result and more interested in the journey. It’s sort of like the ultimate reality show and mini-series wrapped into one. And to tell the truth, it has been the complaint of a few sports writers. It has not been the complaint of the vast viewing public.”
Yeah, well the “vast viewing public” may be getting sick of it. “The opening ceremony for the 2016 Rio Olympics and the first few days of competition have so far, seen a sizable drop in TV audiences compared to the 2012 Summer Games in London,” according to the Wall Street Journal.
Because this Sports Lite/Girl Power thing is really getting out of hand. On Monday night while NBC was assiduously covering every twitch, every rosin application of the American women’s gymnastic team, the Chinese mens’ gymnastic team was turning in a performance that won them a gold medal. I would have loved to see that. Certainly that performance will be recoverable somewhere in our over-wired world, but it would have been much more exciting to see it on the actual day it happened.
Thanks a lot, NBC. I guess you thought I needed my daily fix of Aly, Gabby, and Simone.
