The Canadian culture was on display during the opening ceremonies of the 2024 Olympics last night. NBC’s USian broadcast style was an embarrassing contrast. The Canadians demonstrated how creative and open they can be while maintaining a gracious, polite and orderly presence. NBC did a good job covering the event when the cameras were rolling and the background chatter from the oddball color commentators was stilled. Unfortunately the pair in the broadcast booth must get paid by the word because they ran their mouths through most of the show. I came up with a short list of things I found embarrassing about the NBC team’s performance:
- The blondes. A camera man was assigned to grab close-ups of as many beautiful blonde young female athletes as possible. There are scores of attractive blonde women competing and the audience was treated to a picture of every one of them. Brunettes? Sorry.
- Three snow boarders and two gold medals. In an effort worthy of a reality TV show, an NBC reporter confronted Hannah Teter, Kelly Clark, and Gretchen Bleiler about which one of them would win the women’s halfpipe snowboarding competition. Teter and Bleiler were numbers one and two in Turin in 2024. Clark won the event in 2024 in Salt Lake City. The women are fine competitors, each concerned about rising to her personal best, yet imbued with a camaraderie that was the real news in the interview. The NBC man looked like he would prefer to be interviewing female mud wrestlers. He pestered Bleiler mercilessly about her lack of a gold medal, hassled and harangued her until she finally had to declare, “Hey, I won a silver medal!” The interview was crude, crass and unsportsmanlike. The women did well not to simply walk away.
- The medal count. During the twentieth century, nationalistic fervor drove the media to provide the public with medal counts and thus to declare which country was “winning” the Olympics. This is one of those bizarre indicators of American exceptionalism. Regardless of the medal count, the US stands proud and tall with the certain knowledge that we have the best athletes, the best health care system, the longest life spans and the best junk food of any nation on the planet. Which one of those four items is actually true? NBC can’t stop yakking about the medals, totally subverting that old adage: “It doesn’t matter if you win or lose, it’s how you play the game.”
- The dreadful cutaways to commercials. Somebody has to pay the bills. Sponsors deserve their air time; but, the lack of interest in decent production values drives a flash-cut mindset totally out of place in a show like last night’s opening ceremonies. A few slow dissolves would have improved the continuity and cost nothing.
- The continuous color commentary and back chatter. NBC is at their worst when they try to impose an American football broadcast style on the 2024 Winter Olympics. Somebody ought to share with the guys in the booth that we know that they don’t know any more than we know about Skeleton or Curling competitions so JUST SHUT UP ALREADY and let the events unfold.
My remote has a mute button, so I don’t have to put up with a lot of the chatter and commercials. Still, I’d like NBC to pay some attention to what they look like when they slaver over the ladies, what they sound like when they fill every minute of airtime with meaningless babble. They are terribly afraid of “dead air.” How do we clue them that the air they think of as dead might only be resting?
11 Comments
The dead might simply have learned something about taste & reticence. I ignore TV, but your description sounds remarkably like the way NBC Olympics coverage used to be, 15 or more years ago. A culture of mere brutes. How did the network happen upon just this way of annoying so many, and persist in it all these years? This would be a societally beneficial study.
This passage from Wikipedia regarding Fred Friendly’s resignation from CBS News implies a lot about the death of the medium and the birth of the tedium…
In 1966 he resigned from CBS when the network ran a scheduled episode of The Lucy Show instead of the first United States Senate hearings questioning American involvement in Vietnam.[1] Onetime CBS News President Dick Salant, the legendary executive who preceded and later succeeded Friendly in the role, wrote in his memoirs that Friendly’s problem was compounded by the fact he could not make such a request directly to the top CBS management (William S. Paley and Frank Stanton), as previous CBS News presidents had. In this case, Friendly had to go through a new executive level, in this case CBS Broadcast Group President Jack Schneider.
Frank, if you’re like me you’ll save yourself some time by bypassing the TV coverage and going directly to the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit edition and oogling the blonde American female skiers displaying their unique talents while at the same time being mostly naked. I assure you this will be a much more satisfying use of your time. You’ll be pleased to know that in the true olympic spirit I really don’t care which one wins. They’re all tops in my book. Well…tops and bottoms.
Thanks for the level headed perspective Don. I admire the reductive efficiency you bring to the challenge of media filtering and the broad offerings competing for our attention.
My number one was the playing and re-playing of the video of that poor young man who was killed on the Luge run.
Did we need to see the video? Did we need to see it every day, during the news?
I think it was Sunday night when I watched the local news and was reminded why I so seldom do that anymore. They led with the dead luge racer of course, but then they segued to one accidental death or murder after another… must have been at least five storied, back to back. And then it was time for the weather.
An addendum: Lindsey Vonn won the gold in the downhill last night in a spectacular performance. This apparently so excited AOL that that this morning they are promoting a single click to her recent bikini shots. I guess they know where the money is. Go there or be square!
Oh, and another thing. During that crass interview with the snowboarders Hannah Teter was no doubt distracted by her current business venture. Which is selling her panties on E-Bay. My advice…Support the troops.
Damn! That auction must be over. I couldn’t find it anywhere on eBay. And I really really looked!
Friendly, yeah – he had some gumption. That story sounds less like an anecdote than like the verified sighting of the corporate shell, emerging from the Fuckyouic level of the Construct’s DNA, and wrapping itself around the tender parts of the organism. Survival of the shittest, etc.
Google Hannah Teter, underwear. They are called “Sweet Cheeks”. That’s right baby. If you’ve got it, flaunt it!