For the television-watching marathon that officially begins Friday, viewers need some Olympic-style preparation.
We’re not just talking about earplugs to deal with the opening ceremonies appearance by — no joke — Olivia Newton-John. We’re talking the real stuff of Olympic champions.
Some banned-but-not-easily-detectable steroids should give potentially overwhelmed viewers strength, stamina and facial hair, even in women.
A corporate sponsor will make it possible to stay home from work and watch much of the record 441 1/2 hours of coverage on NBC, MSNBC and CNBC.
And, of course, a skin-tight synthetic suit will not only make the dedicated viewer look exactly as athletic as people who wear warmup suits to the mall, it also will cut wind resistance, helping produce possible record times for trips to the bathroom and the basement party refrigerator.
And you certainly ought to tape construction paper (in dollar-bill green, the Olympic color) over all the clocks in your home, the better to forget that these games, originating 16 hours away in Sydney, Australia, are being presented on American TV almost a full day after they take place.
Call them the VCR Games, because that is what NBC will be playing, although it at least will be more honest about it this time. At the 1996 Atlanta games, the network made sure not to inform viewers things were being shown on tape, covering this chicanery with the glorious euphemism “plausibly live.”
In Sydney, where the time zones make live implausible and criticism over last time’s fraud still resonates, the network telecast, emceed by Bob Costas, will fess up nightly.
In these games’ slightly confusing scenario, viewers who don’t want to learn event results before seeing the event should avoid other news outlets during the day.
Still, the network is expecting success, predicting an average prime-time rating of about 18 million homes tuned in, not as many as the 21.6 million that watched the 1996 summer games on American soil, but a respectable number.
It is mildly astonishing, in this era of reflexive skepticism about everyone from politicians to heads of charities, that the Olympiad’s myriad scandals have not left a coating of tar and feathers on the games themselves.
We believe in the games still, despite all the reports that suggest the International Olympic Committee is run with slightly less openness and responsibility to the public than the Cosa Nostra.
We believe in the athletes, still, despite widespread evidence suggesting you can’t win anymore without altering your body chemistry.
We want to believe.
We want to see hard cases turn into heroes, bad-boy gymnasts demonstrate you can stick your body with piercings and still stick the landing, stars of Olympics-anticipating Nike commercials prove on the track their worthiness to endorse.
We want to see names like Marion Jones and Ian Thorpe join the pantheon of gold medalists past.
Many of us seem to want, even, the syrupy way NBC packages the games, turning athletic competition into a reality-based television show, real sports into a soap opera with sweat beads.
(Of course, what we want most of all, speaking of the Cosa Nostra, is a little old-fashioned kneecap bashing. The Tonya Harding-Nancy Kerrigan 1994 winter games, out of near-Arctic Norway, remain the most-watched of recent history.)
NBC calls its Olympics telecasting technique “storytelling,” using that culturally potent word as a mantra for its coverage, designed to lure as many women as men to the set. And it works, in terms of the numbers. But NBC “tells” its “stories” as if the target audience is really those who are also moved by the rhyming stanzas in greeting cards.
Mawkish music, slushy sentiment and a morbid fascination with death and disease have been the hallmark of NBC Olympics coverage past, and, from a preview offered the press in June, it will be much the same this time around.
And all of it is tainted by a jingoism that is best symbolized by NBC’s taking seriously the ritual pummeling by the NBA players on the U.S. basketball team.
It’s not journalism befitting a broadcasting entity, which, in a perfect world, would try to provide insight into the best athletes and most interesting stories, whatever the ratings consequences. It’s propaganda befitting — and benefiting — a partner, which NBC surely is with the International Olympic Committee, having locked up rights to all of the games, summer and winter, through 2008 in some backroom dealing that left no other potential broadcaster able to offer even a competing bid.
The partnership is the reason NBC’s on-screen logo has been tarted up with the Olympic rings for so many months now, turning the network’s prime-time programming, even Emmy winners such as “The West Wing” and “Will & Grace,” into ticky-tacky billboards for an upcoming show.
The partnership sees the network imitating the see-no-evil posture of the IOC on the use of performance-enhancing drugs. NBC will report on people who are caught, to be sure, but any real digging would be stunning. Indeed, an unrefuted charge of softness on the issue was included in one of the newspaper clippings sent to reporters by NBC itself.
In tacit return, the partnership sees the IOC keeping other journalistic organizations from using any event footage till 2 a.m. the morning after NBC finally airs it. And even then the precious seconds of track or field are doled out like pennies from the purse of preconversion Scrooge.
This, obviously, presents a serious challenge to other news organizations. Cable sports leader ESPN says it plans to compensate with aggressive reporting of its own during daytime broadcasts, reporting scores in real time and using athlete interviews to try to compensate for the missing tumbling runs and soccer goals.
“Is it frustrating? Sure,” said Bob Eaton, the ESPN managing editor. “There is no other sporting event in the world that places these severe restrictions on how you cover it. But at this point, it’s pretty much, `These are the rules and you have to deal with it.'”
At night though, when the NBC prime-time effort is in its full glory, ESPN will play a game of its own, giving less prominence to the Olympics for competitive reasons, Eaton acknowledged.
In local news, the balance may be more difficult. “The biggest issue for us is not the lack of highlights,” said Eric Lerner, news director at Chicago market leader WLS-Ch. 7.
It is, instead, that “we don’t want to upset our viewers.”
So the station will report the day’s Olympic doings on its afternoon and early-evening newscasts, but with a warning that viewers who plan to watch NBC later will want to block their eyes and ears.
You can’t buy that kind of publicity.
Still, however hard they work to avoid hearing scores in advance, viewers must come to the NBC telecasts accepting that it is, again, another reality TV show, “Survivor” without the nudity.
From the sound of NBC’s plans, more hardcore sports fans will want to watch the two NBC cable channels, where the hosts are Jim Lampley and, taking time from the busy and satisfying life of a syndicated entertainment “news” show host, Pat O’Brien.
Viewers of CNBC and MSNBC will get complete games of things like soccer and softball and the many other intriguing events NBC will squeeze out of network prime-time so that it can give us every last warm-up stretch in glamor events such as gymnastics.
It is traditional, at some point in an Olympics preview piece, to make fun of the new events. But as silly as synchronized diving and trampoline could prove to be, you have to admit that triathlon and women’s pole vault sound pretty cool.
Besides, in an event where synchronized swimming continues to earn the same Olympic gold medal as the 100-meter dash, there really is no new tweaking to be done.
So let the games, and the games being played with the games, begin. Or you could just watch the “Survivor” reruns that CBS is showing nightly, starting Friday.
