This is even worse in an Olympics with fewer upsets There aren’t too many upsets when Katie Ledecky is around. And it tries to cut everything together to maximize not the story of the event, but the ending it already knows is coming. It has winner and loser edits (an industry term for the kinds of edits provided to favored contestants - and their opposite - in reality shows). Thus, for many events - but for the prerecorded events especially - NBC more or less presents the Olympics like a reality show. Its presentation of the events features no tension, no buildup. For instance, NBC presented the decathlon largely as a collection of quick moments - showing only the final high jump from several competitors, say. You can look at events other than gymnastics to see this as well. All of the evidence suggests NBC cuts together the package and then records voiceover for it. There are no occasions where they seem startled, or where we cut in on them as they were in the middle of talking about something else. Nothing illustrates just how packaged this footage is more than the commentators, who are ostensibly commenting on things live as they happen but are always, always in sync with NBC’s preconceived narratives. NBC has mostly cut out that waiting period entirely, in favor of footage of other gymnasts, or cutting to commercial, or just jumping right to the scores. Think of, say, when gymnasts used to have to wait for the judges to provide their scores, of the tension in that moment when everything could be dashed. Whether it’s a slow dribble downcourt on basketball or the pitcher waiting for the catcher to call for the right pitch, a lot of sports is about the tension that arises in these moments of waiting for something to happen. The players will run a play, and then there will be a long period where they wander around and you wait for something to happen. If you watch a lot of live sports on TV, you’ll know that they’re mostly dead air. It will roll through one competitor, then another, then another, then another, with little respect for the passage of time. Its edits eliminate everything inconvenient to telling a straightforward story about a hero (ideally an American, though a massively talented athlete from a nation Americans have heard of - Usain Bolt, for instance - will do) vanquishing all comers. (Whether this should continue to be the case in an age of social media and streaming remains an open question.) But with every Olympiad, NBC turns its coverage of these events more and more into a reality show.
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Contriving to put the biggest events in primetime, regardless of time differences, has been a staple of TV coverage of the games since the very earliest days. This, in and of itself, isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It airs these events in primetime, but they actually occur in the afternoon, Eastern time, so everything viewers see is something that has already happened and we can go and look up the results if we really want to. Photo by Ian Walton/Getty ImagesĪ good case in point is the network’s coverage of gymnastics events. This coverage utilizes some of the worst aspects of reality show editing Coverage of the decathlon, featuring American Ashton Eaton, has been plagued by the same editing issues as NBC’s gymnastics coverage. So what makes NBC’s Olympics coverage so bad, so wedded to stupid narratives, so airless?Īfter watching more of it, I think I have an answer: The network has completely eliminated suspense from the equation.
But, of course, sports are a form of entertainment, and plenty of other networks (including NBC) present them as events in progress, not as carefully packaged and edited stories cut down from prerecorded footage. I’ve generally chalked this up to NBC treating the Olympics as entertainment, not sports. And those primetime installments are by far the most watched Olympics coverage out there, so they’re most viewers’ primary consumption of the Olympics.
But in the primetime hours, NBC reimagines an athletic competition as an episode of Dateline, and it just doesn’t work. The more I watch of NBC’s primetime Olympic coverage, the more perplexed I am by how bad it is.Īs I stated last week, the network’s streaming app is a terrific way to watch the Olympics, and its daytime coverage on both NBC and its various cable networks is solid too.