The London 2012 summer games have just come to an end, and I already miss them. Not that watching them was a perfect entertainment experience - far from it - but when the Olympics are on, I always have a fuzzy feeling of warmth and goodwill. But enough of all this cheeriness! Let's coldly dissect how these particular games went!
Opening Ceremonies
London had a lot to prove after the jaw-dropping spectacle of Beijing in 2008. And frankly? They blew it. Filmmaker Danny Boyle has done some great work, but this was not amongst his finest. The Beijing ceremonies embraced all that can be done with masses of people and cutting-edge technology. The London ceremony started with... Peasant women leading cows around and and men in top hats gravely stroking their chins. Ostensibly, Boyle wanted to paint a living picture of Britain's history, but that's not what we got. Here's what we got:
33% devoted to boring, old-timey playacting - This would be the aforementioned peasants and industrialists.
33% devoted to a salute to texting - No, really. A retrospective of music to accompany the fascinating story of two modern kids trying to hook up, all presented via low-rent So You Think You Can Dance choreography.
33% devoted to recognizing cliched things that are British - Hey! Did you know that Voldemort is British? Here he is! And... Let's see... Ooh! Mary Poppins is British! And Mr. Bean is British! And we have a queen! She's pretty British! I'm surprised they didn't drop figgy pudding on the crowd.
1% devoted to adoration of the British health care system - I mean, yay and everything. I wish America had a similar health care system, but really? You want part your grand pageant to be presented across the entire world to sing the praises of the bureaucratic methods of keeping people healthy? You couldn't get the ode to efficient train scheduling done on time?
The one thing about the Opening Ceremonies that worked was the apparent liquid formation of the Olympic rings, which then ascended into the air. That was pretty cool.
The Events
Ah, the meat of the Olympics. So how did they stack up? Well, from the limited amount of events I was able to witness (which we'll get to in a bit), they were pretty damned awesome. Some of the synchronized diving made me gasp with delight. I cringed in anticipation and anxiety every time a gymnast looked like she was about to crack her skull open on the balance beam. And some routines out-and-out made my jaw drop to the floor.
And sure, there are always events that fail to get a single droplet of my blood pumping (that would be beach volleyball's anthropomorphic ears burning right about now), but for the most part, it's always thrilling to see athleticism at its finest.
The Coverage
How to put this delicately? NBC fucking sucks a metric ton of donkey balls. There isn't much they weren't able to screw up. Curiously, one of the most widespread complaints is something I had no problem with at all - the time delay. Great Britain is several hours ahead of us. If Americans wanted to watch events live, we'd have to be in front of our televisions in the middle of a weekday afternoon, which many of us cannot swing. To my mind, there's nothing wrong with airing event footage during primetime.
Of course, that assumes that they're actually showing events. You'd be forgiven for thinking that the Olympics should just change its name to Swimnastics after the coverage that we got. I like the swimming and gymnastics events, but I would have liked to have seen some other things as well. Archery. Wrestling. Table tennis. Some kind of variety. But no, it was swim, swim, dive, swim, gymnastics, beach volleyball, gymnastics, swim, gymnastics, beach volleyball, and then maybe some gymnastics.
That laser-like focus was bad enough, but then they had to narrow it even further, and only deigned to discuss certain athletes. And I'm not even just talking about focusing on Americans, with barely a thought given to, you know, the other countries that are competing in this international event. They pre-judged who would be the stars of the games, and then concentrated on those people, even when their performances did not justify the attention. Ryan Lochte is the new Michael Phelps! Except for the winning-all-the-medals part! Jordyn Wieber came into these games with a world championship under her belt, so let's talk all about her, even when it becomes clear that she contributes no more to the gymnastics team than any other member. I realize that Americans are keen to know how Americans are doing at the games, but I really wish NBC would have spread the wealth a little.
If they had, though, I suppose we would have been treated to more commentary and interviews, both of which were blood-curdlingly awful this year. A sampling:
-Talking about the Arctic Monkeys' cover of a Beatles song...during the song. Shut up so we can hear it for ourselves!
-Cutting away from the Opening Ceremonies (during a memorial tribute to terrorism victims, no less) for a canned Ryan Seacrest interview with Michael Phelps.
-Meredith Viera and Matt Lauer laughingly admitting that they'd never heard of Tim Berners-Lee during his tribute. If only they worked at a news organization and had access to facts!
-Referring to Madagascar in the Parade of Nations by saying there are kids' movies named that, too. Ugh.
-Asking a girl who just won a gold medal in the most intense athletic competition in the world how she feels about Justin Bieber.
-"What was your strategy in giving Michael the lead?" "Um. To give him a lead."
-"She's building to a difficult dismount, which will come at the end of her routine."
-"[This diver] is facing the water, which is where he'll end up."
Crap like that, in addition to the sappy, pre-packaged hometown hero stories, made the Olympics a much more frustrating enterprise than it needed to be. I want to see lots of events, lots of countries, and intelligent commentary. I got none of that. NBC will point to their ratings and claim that they must be doing something right, ignoring the fact that people who wanted any access to the games were forced to accept their shitty coverage. It's not like viewers flocked to their network because it was doing such an awesome job.
The Overall Experience
Still, if it's a choice between disappointing coverage and no coverage, I'll begrudgingly accept the former. I'd change a lot of things about how the Olympics are presented, but I still had grand fun watching some of these events, and am already looking forward to the next games. The piss poor coverage may have dampened my enthusiasm a bit, but the Olympics will always have an iron grip on my heart.
2 comments:
"That laser-like focus was bad enough, but then they had to narrow it even further, and only deigned to discuss certain athletes. And I'm not even just talking about focusing on Americans, with barely a thought given to, you know, the other countries that are competing in this international event. They pre-judged who would be the stars of the games, and then concentrated on those people, even when their performances did not justify the attention."
NBC's producers feel they have to make judgments before the Olympics. That is more efficient and it is slick. What producers do not want to be slick? That is why they get the big bucks.
I'm not sure what you mean by "slick". If it's that the producers deciding what they're going to talk about ahead of time meaning that they can have their segments and interviews prepared and don't have to deal with things that are actually relevant to what's going on in real-time, then I'd agree that that's what they did (and that it's easier), but not that it's a good thing from an audience perspective.
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