2004-08-17 - 2:18 p.m.
Oh NBC. You had met at hello...and then you lost me at gymnastics. For the most part NBC's coverage of the Olympics has been stellar. I would qualify that with the fact that I've been watching most of the coverage on TiVo. In fact there are points where I'll put in on pause so that we can then fast forward through the boring stuff (like the swimming prelims).
Anyway, NBC has kept the weepy backsotires to a minimum. Had great commentators. I mean the lady who does the synchronized diving rocks. She's great about pointing out the falws of a dive and how the scoring system works. They have the stro-mo that shows you exactly what the divers are doing wrong. And most of the other commentators are almost as good. For example, Rowdy Gains makes sure to give all of the swimmer their due, not just he Americans. I find that the volleyball commentators really talk about strategy in an understandable way.
This all eads us to the excreable gymanstics coverage. It's everything that the other sports are NOT. BAAAAD BAAAD commentary with stilted horrible metaphors and puns. Lack of real information on the quality of a routine. And teh nthere's the complete partisanship of the NBC producers who decide to focus all the attention on the Americans. I'd like the Americans to win as much as the next person, but in order to understand what happened I need to see how the other team,s are doing. For example, they only showed one rotation of the Japanese men, even though between the first and the second rotations, the Japanese men went for dead last to third. So how did they pull that off? Beats me. NBC didn't show it. We HEARD that the Japanese men were pulling ahead but we never got to see it. And I want to see if to see how our guys are stacking up. If we are ahead, how comfortable is our lead? If we are behind, how big of a score to we need? All of this is important to rooting for your team.
I hope the men's gymnastics was only a glitch in an otherwise stellar coverage but if it isn't, I'll be writing a very stern letter.
