| 16 February 2010
I'm not going to come out and make an outlandish statement like, "I'm a better program director than whoever's in charge of the Olympic broadcast on NBC," but after reading Washington Post TV Columnist Tom Shales' glowing review of the peacock's Olympic cover, I felt compelled to say something.
In my opinion, if anything NBC is failing to deliver the basic necessities of great Olympics coverage: live events, features on interesting athletes from the United States and other countries and smart programming choices.
NBC displayed the latter of the list Feb. 17 when the start of the Canada vs. Norway men's hockey game was delayed 17 minutes for the end of a women's preliminary curling match between the United States and Japan on MSNBC.
Close to one whole period of hockey. And what were the other NBC affliates up to? USA opted to show a rerun of the drama "White Collar." SyFy showed some thrilling third-rate action film squeezed in just before professional wrestling, and CNBC finished up the United States women's hockey team's 13-0 slaughter of Russia (as if the program director couldn't determine the game was no contest after the 10th goal).
Now I'm not saying a game in progress needs to be cut away from just to serve male hockey fans, but it was halfway through the first period before NBC had the Canadian hockey game running on another network, dubbing it "bonus coverage." Not a word was spoken on Twitter, Facebook or the NBC Web site to guide confused viewers to their destination.
Pathetic.
As for live events, well, you're probably better off watching an Internet stream from Russia, England or Canada if you want to experience the thrill of live Olympic sports. I understand some sports are held back for the primetime show, but when social media is ruining the results in real-time, it's hard to care about the force-feed package of sports NBC has waiting at 8 p.m.
Swing and a miss, Tom.
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