Everything’s amazing, and nobody’s happy (except the advertisers). By my count, for example, it required nine cameras, one of them an overhead crane, just to film the heats of Tuesday’s ski cross event. That cost comes before you factor in the expenses of flying and lodging (and compensating) hundreds of employees, many of them freelancers, to Vancouver and Whistler. The fallout is that NBC is paying $820 million to televise these sixteen days from British Columbia.
Maybe it was Ebersol’s first- love legacy with the five-ringed spectacle: he got his start in television as an Olympic researcher at ABC at the 1968 Winter Olympics while still an undergrad at Yale (this was back in the days when a network’s under-25 male workforce was not entirely comprised of the progeny of that network’s executives) “You have to wonder what possessed them to up the ante in 2003,” Rick Gentile, a former executive producer of CBS’ Olympics telecasts, told the Hollywood Reporter last month. NBC’s offer may have been fiscally reckless. The Peacock outbid the next closest competitor, Fox, by 50% (Fox bid $1.3 billion). We may prefer to not know the cold, hard facts about televising the Vancouver Games, but here they are: In 2003 NBC bid $2 billion for the rights to Vancouver and the 2012 Summer Games in London. While I count Franz Klammer’s downhill run in 1976 and the U.S.A.-Russia 1980 hockey game as the two most exciting sporting events I’ve ever seen on television (even though I was watching both on tape-delay), I realize that we no longer live in an era when you can just turn off the radio to occlude your awareness of current events.īut here is something that only children and Goldman Sachs employees fail to understand: everything comes at a price. Understand: I, too, would have enjoyed seeing the alpine adventures of the Lindseys, Vonn and Jacobellis, live. By showing the premier events in prime-time, be they live or tape-delay, NBC is simply maximizing revenue. We would do well to take one dose of comedian Louis C.K.’s “Everything’s Amazing and Nobody’s Happy” () rant and down it with a thirsty swig of Grow Up juice.Ĭommercial television is not a publicly-owned utility, like electricity or the bathrooms at McDonald’s. We are a nation that gets collectively pissed off if our SUVs seats aren’t heated, if our cheesy gordita is not crunched to munch. Outrage? Outrage at NBC’s Olympics coverage? Look at us.
Deadspin, the Lampwick of sports web sites, felt so self-righteously indignant last week that it printed the email address of NBC Sports president Dick Ebersol (The joke’s on you, Deadspin: Ebersol never checks his email).Ĭhildren, please. To judge from the coverage the Games have received on the sports blogs, though, no event is more newsworthy than NBC’s churlish decision to deprive us of seeing any of them live.
The 2010 Winter Olympics features fifteen different types of events (e.g., curling). And we want to see it before someone has a chance to tweet about it. Twenty-one years ago Freddie Mercury unwittingly gave the Vancouver Olympics’ television audience its battle cry.
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