Wars are waged, love is found and lost, history marches on, but through all of this and more the television flame is never extinguished.
From the humblest cue-card holder to the proudest studio host, from the cable-access channel in Manchester, N.H., to the big networks in Los Angeles, talented men and women working in television have devoted their lives to one dream: to share their creativity with an appreciative public on the electronic stage.
The story of CNBC’s “The Olympic Show” embodies the soul and spirit of the television dream, a story of hope, human dignity and the very real possibility of a lasting world peace.
Sorry.
As the swelling paragraphs above may have led you to guess, I just finished watching the first two episodes of “The Olympic Show.” I just had to see what it feels like to write the way every TV person who gets close to the Olympics seems to, in florid sentences abloom with cliches and sonorous-but-not-necessarily-true sentiments about Sport and the Meaning of Life.
It feels like worms under my T-shirt, is my answer, and I wasn’t even able to incorporate the mandatory Olympicese verbs “toil” and “quest” into my word-processing routine. Writing it feels even creepier than it does to have this pap pushed down our gullets every two years in all those feature stories that take the place of sporting events during Olympic broadcasts.
And if “The Olympic Show” is any indication, we should settle in for a whole lot more of this ethos, which tries to turn athletes into characters in an opera by Hallmark.
With CBS’ recent signoff at the Olympic Winter Games from Japan, the Olympic microphone passes to NBC, which holds broadcast rights to the next five Games, Winter and Summer, through 2008.
The half-hour “Olympic Show,” slated to air every Saturday through the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, is NBC’s attempt to keep Olympic fever burning in viewers’ bodies. It will air Saturdays at 6 p.m. on one of the network’s cable outlets, CNBC, otherwise known as the home of Charles Grodin, Geraldo Rivera and a whole lot of business wonks.
This appetite whetting is a sound strategy and one CBS could have used, to judge by the weak ratings its Nagano coverage earned. Not only will the show offer people a chance to familiarize themselves with the players before curtain, it will give the network vast stores of footage to draw from.
But the content in the first two shows — in which host Dan Hicks mouths such phrases as “swifter, higher, stronger” and “Olympic essence” — is not encouraging.
All of next Saturday’s second episode is devoted to women at the 1996 Atlanta games, including disingenuous segments on the glory of the U.S. women’s softball and soccer gold medal wins. Unmentioned is that those games barely found airtime in NBC’s coverage.
The second show also plays it loose with some facts, offering highlights and emotional rememberances of the U.S. women’s soccer gold medal game but not the final score. Worse, it repeats the canard that Kerri Strug’s heroic injured vault “secured gold for the American gymnastics team.” People, including Strug and her coaches, believed that at the time, yes, but it turned out to be statistically untrue.
In Saturday’s debut, meanwhile, separate features on Norwegian speedskater Johann Olav Koss and Australian sprinter Cathy Freeman exemplify the unexamined hero creation that plagues Olympic — and most of sports — TV feature reporting.
That is not to say that Koss, who apparently did some nice work with kids in Eritrea, and Freeman, an Aborigine who has championed the cause of her people, are not also praiseworthy in street clothes.
But these pieces — expertly produced, with complex imagery and appropriate backup music — amount to propaganda, ignoring any of the subtleties and contradictions that make real humans, even real humans who can move extra fast, interesting.
“For Koss,” Hicks says, “victory brought more than just gold. It provided the means to make a better world.”
And Freeman, he informs us, “won not only the gold medal, but the hearts of all Australians.”
Ick. When an athlete finally gets a chance to speak at length, you see how much better this stuff could be if the producers would trust viewers with the uninflated facts.
With astonishing eloquence, shortstop Dot Richardson tells us how much the softball victory meant. Ditto for U.S. basketball player Teresa Edwards on what the sport means to her. And an Olympic-history highlight package unfolds almost without narration.
There is a minimum of writerly hectoring, yet these pieces somehow manage to stir those feelings broadcasters are always insisting we have about the biennial sporting meets.
