Grading NBC's coverage halfway through Olympics
Robert Thompson watches television for a living. As a professor of popular culture at Syracuse University, he also awards grades for a living. Thompson has been watching copious amounts of the Rio Games on TV. Now that we’re halfway through, what’s his midterm grade for NBC’s prime-time coverage?
“Maybe I’m an easy grader, but I give it a solid B,” Thompson tells Paste BN Sports. “They do a very credible job of putting on a program that will be enjoyed by as many people as possible within the limitations of having to be interrupted by so many ad breaks. I’m frustrated by all those ads as well, but you can’t lower a grade for too many commercials. That’s why they call it commercial television.”
Thompson, director of Syracuse’s Bleier Center for Television & Popular Culture, awards an A for NBC’s technical wizardry in Rio and no better than B-minus for its commentators. He cites several high-profile gaffes, including Al Trautwig originally declining to call Simone Biles’ parents through adoption her parents, Dan Hicks saying a male coach was “the guy responsible” for a female athlete’s gold medals and Chris Marlowe referring to the wife of a lesbian beach volleyball player as her husband.
NBC is producing thousands of hours of Olympic programming in Rio. That’s a lot of chances to screw up.
“It is a small percentage, that is true,” Thompson says, “but then again, these are professional broadcasters at the Olympics.”
Thompson says sexist language is called out in real time on Twitter these days. He thinks if you went back and looked at the tapes you’d find worse things were said on air in decades past, when cultural norms allowed such language to go by unchallenged.
“From a technical standpoint, I have to give (NBC) an A,” Thompson says. “They get these great close-ups. They rarely miss something. They have cameras everywhere. With gymnasts, you see the complex ways in which the human body can move. It’s stunningly beautiful, like sculpture.”
Complaining about Olympic television coverage is sort of another Olympic event. Everyone does it, or so it seems. Thompson says that is a function of so many people watching it. This year complaints began before the flame was lit, when the opening ceremony was aired on tape delay and interrupted frequently in its first hour by commercial breaks.
“The big story of the Olympics, within the first hour of them starting, was: ‘Look what a horrible job NBC is doing,’ ” Thompson says. Things didn’t get better for the march-on of the athletes, when NBC’s Hoda Kotb offered a bad pun, in bad taste, about the African nation of Djibouti.
“That wouldn’t be funny if you were 12,” Thompson says. “The opening ceremony, all the little comments and bad puns, made the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade seem like Masterpiece Theatre.”
Then, when the competition began, came the familiar complaints of Olympics past about tape-delayed coverage, particularly of gymnastics. Thompson gives NBC a break on this one. Swimming and track, live in prime time, offer events suited to commercial breaks, he says, while gymnastics is more suited to editing into a linear storyline to accommodate commercial breaks.
“Obviously, when you’re paying $1.2 billion to televise these Games,” Thompson says, “someone has to pay for it.”
NBC counters the complaints about tape-delay by pointing out that everything is available live on streaming, but Thompson says even some of his students — millennials who are supposed to know such things — are bewildered about how to do it.
“If you showed gymnastics live in the afternoon and then put it on prime time,” Thompson says, “some people would complain, ‘They’re showing what I watched this afternoon.’ I could write that tweet right now.”
For all of the complaints about it, Thompson thinks that so many people watch the Olympics precisely because so many of them like the highly edited, packaged and overproduced coverage of the Games.
“For all of its old-fashioned nature, it is a pretty sophisticated show they put on,” he says. “Clearly, these things cost a fortune to get the rights to and in order to accommodate that requires all of these strategies where you have to maximize audiences.
“They’re putting on a show. That’s one of the biggest complaints you hear: ‘NBC doesn’t care about the sports, they care about entertainment.’ I think that’s true. So what? You think they’re going to pay $1.2 billion and then give us purist coverage?”
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