I don’t know about you but I enjoy following The Olympics, always have. I like watching the various events and learning little bits and pieces about the athletes. You can depend upon the networks to do a couple of profiles that are really interesting.
And you can also depend upon the networks to do something really dumb. In their infinite wisdom they’ll hit a bulls eye in the boneheaded move category.
This year NBC has repeated some of the mistakes of the past. There is one in particular that chaps my hide. The suits have this nasty habit of showing events hours after the results have been posted on the Net. Look, I understand that Bejing is 15 hours ahead and that they are trying to do the best they can to help sell advertising by trying to push games into primetime.
That was fine when you hadn’t any access to the Net. When the best you could do was a string a couple of tomato cans together no one knew what was going on across the world and you could get away with tape delay.
But those monkeys don’t seem to care that there are millions of people who enjoy watching the events live. I want to savor the excitement of watching Michael Phelps race without knowing in advance that he is going to crush the competition. I want to wonder what is going to happen in gymnastics and ponder the possibilities.
Too bad for Old Jack. NBC doesn’t give a rat’s ass about that. They’ll show us Wednesday’s events on Thursday and then follow up by showing Thursday on Friday. A perverse Groundhog Day cycle.
Thanks for nothing NBC.
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