Olympics coverage! Yay!
For the past week or so, the Rio 2016 Olympics have overtaken the vast majority of my free time. Honestly, I don’t mind this at all; NBC puts on a pretty good show, at least for the primetime viewers, and vicariously experiencing the joy of victory and the agony of defeat doesn’t really get old. I don’t watch “normal” sports, but I’m surprisingly fine with the Olympic Games – I guess I like everything compacted into a two week period, so nothing becomes rote or old. Also, people often end up surprising themselves by winning gold medals in events they never imagined they would, so that’s a lot of fun too!
But, unsurprisingly, I have my own complaints when watching anything (I mean, that’s partly what I use this blog for, right?), and so I thought I’d throw some of them out there to see if anyone else agreed. Alrighty, here we go!
- You know what? Maybe 4 hours is too long for primetime. I mean, I like the Olympics, but I’m not sure I need such a density of events and commercials that we somehow fill four whole hours of time. Thank God for DVR, or I think it would drive me mad! I don’t even want to talk about Sunday extending that to 5 hours, not to mention the completely unwatchable coverage on every other NBC station on the planet (who could even watch all this stuff, really? Look, I get they paid several billion dollar for coverage rights, but you can cut us viewers some slack, NBC. Maybe with a Olympics streaming service or something, a Netflix of sports?
- Rio 2016, at least for those of us on the East Coast of the United States, shows a lot of live coverage of the events. That sounds weird, but the past few Olympic Games, both Summer and Winter, occurred way outside U.S. time zones, from Torino to Beijing to Vancouver (well, notably less than the other ones) to London to Sochi. Because of this, NBC could curate the content somewhat, ensuring the pacing of the primetime broadcast didn’t inundate the viewer with the exact same sort of event over and over again. Unfortunately, with Rio, most viewers were subjected to swimming for hours and hours on end, with little to no breaks in-between – anybody could get bored after seeing that many heats, quarterfinals, semifinals, and finals strung together except for the most diehard of swimming enthusiasts.
- Also, I get that gymnastics and beach volleyball are popular among the U.S. audience – that’s great! – but you think we could see where some of these other gold medals come from. I mean, heck, the first gold medal for the United States these Olympics came from 10m Air Rifle. That’s a sport? How did that happen? How does it even work? We don’t even get to know, because apparently new things cause the ratings to drop. Instead, we need another dramatic hype montage of gymnastics, or Michael Phelps, or some race I just saw yesterday! It’s just weird how they assume every audience is a new audience, when it seems pretty likely the same people watching yesterday are the same people watching today.
- The sport they use as filler are also devastatingly slow and awful to watch. I mean, seriously, why are you showing me the 10,000m race right now? They know it’s 30 minutes long, and add the commercials to that fills up a whole hour. The rest of the Olympics can’t be that boring, can they? I just sorta hate that I know some of these events wouldn’t even be aired if not for the fact that Tom Hammond needs to fill the air time in track & field with his hilariously inane commentary (“Here’s a look at exactly what you’re seeing on your screen, and could have deduced by yourself! Better say everybody’s name multiple times so that there’s no awkward silences! Unlike most stadiums, the track lines are blue!”).
- Probably the only thing really bad was the opening ceremony, though; the thing went on forever, to the point where my DVR didn’t even record the whole thing. Plus, I never need to hear Matt Lauer and Meredith Viera fill my ears ever again, though I know I’ll have to subject myself to it this coming Sunday. Sigh…
Anyway, I’m still enjoying it, I just needed to vent a little bit.
