What if they held the Olympics and nobody gave a rat's ass?
Well, I suppose we're in the process of finding out. I'm not sure which is worse, trying to get interested in not-so-ambiguously gay figure skaters and sports that were invented five minutes ago for the X-Games or listening to media people pretending they're interested.
It's not that I dislike the events or that I care whether Johnny Weir is gay or not. I've got no problem with snowboarders or gays. I guess what bothers me is that it's disingenuous of the media to bombard us with coverage of events that they neither know anything about, nor would care about if they didn't have the word "Olympics" attached to them. But such is the price we pay for living in a 500-channel universe. All that air time demands something to blab about, and right now, this is what there is. Poor NBC -- the network of the Olympics. They're stuck with this crapfest. The other day I watched the increasingly annoying Katie Couric interview Dick Button about men's figure skating on the Today show. We've got insurgents setting off bombs every day in Iraq and the Vice President shooting people in the face and a midterm election coming up later this year and NBC is spending every waking minute on this frenzied, sickeningly self-promotional clucking about the Olympics.
By the way, if Katie gets the big chair over at the CBS Evening News -- as has been the rumor for months -- Edward R. Murrow will roll over in his grave.
As much as I like NBC, they don't have much of a track record when it comes to Olympic coverage. Remember in 1992 when they tried selling people on three pay-per-view channels of Summer Olympic coverage? It worked so well they never tried it again. But that was a long time ago. NBC's problems with these Winter Games are many. There's the fact that nobody follows any of these sports, for starters. But then there's the little problem of the six-hour time difference in a world of instant information. No Internet in 1992. No live stats on the Web. No 24-hour ESPN News Network. Every day, NBC's people -- like IDIOTS -- are telling you to look away from the screen while they flash the results of events they're not going to show for hours.
News flash: It doesn't work anymore. Nobody is going to wait if they're at all interested. To me, it's the same concept that doomed the Star Wars prequels. The idea of waiting three years to find out what happened to Luke Skywaker worked in 1977. But not in 1999. And Jar Jar Binks didn't exactly help the cause either. But we were a more patient society 30 years ago. And, of course, back then we had an enemy to defeat at the Olympics. No more Soviets, no more drama.
Today, for drama, we look to American Idol and Dancing With the Stars -- proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that it doesn't take much to keep us entertained.
1 comment:
Your blog is hilarious!
Post a Comment