Quote:
Originally Posted by PilotMan
The Olympics this year seem like a complete and total shit show. Perhaps they should have passed on this one.
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I blame Tanya Harding.
Not directly, more a butterfly effect of, well, shit show. That was the moment when the networks realized that they could be telling stories (which they do very well) rather than doing the legwork necessary to make pageantry out of sometimes difficult-to-understand sports in difficult places.
On nights when Tanya and Nancy skated, there were 38 commercial minutes per hour. Ratings were astronomical and CBS made a fortune.
There were 24 skaters in the final. How many of them did CBS viewers see perform? Maybe half, maybe less. The figure-skating long programs are one of the crown jewels of Winter Olympics. And how much did we see from other events?
Now, all you get is profile pieces for the telegenic US athletes, a handful of foreign competitors, the pageantry of the opening ceremony (interspersed with more profile pieces), incredible numbers of commercials. Sometimes you get to see a tiny piece of a sporting event that happened half a day earlier, but not enough of it to really follow it.
And curling and hockey on the side channels. Since those are team competitions with two teams, at least the networks know they have to televise them in full. But curling is never going to be more than ordinary people playing shuffleboard with brooms and granite slabs on ice. OK once every four years. And hockey still has to compete with odd start times.
It's not just skip this one. It's figuring out how to get back to what made the Olympics interesting in the first place.