NBC's Huge Gamble Pays Off With Stirring Olympic Telecasts

Last week I focused on my personal love/hate relationship with NBC's prime time coverage of the Beijing Olympics and asked readers to e-mail me their own lists. Many responded and most clearly seemed to like what they saw over the 17 days of the Games.

Before we get to those comments, it should be noted that NBC's ratings were staggering, with a prime time audience that reached 211 million in the U.S. through Saturday night. That surpassed the previous record of 209 million viewers for the network's coverage of the 1996 Games in Atlanta. NBC averaged about 27 million viewers per night, an 11 percent increase over the prime time audience for the Athens Games in 2004.

Whatever you may think of the actual coverage itself, there can be no doubt that NBC Sports President Dick Ebersol's strategy of scheduling swimming and gymnastics competitions the first week in the morning in China -- and aired live in prime time in the U.S. ¿ worked. It was a typical gold medal move from the smartest man in sports television.

The International Olympic Committee obviously had to sign off on that decision, but the Lords of the Rings had 894 million reasons -- as in an $894 million rights fee paid to the IOC by NBC -- to do it. The result was some of the most consistently riveting live drama ever seen in an Olympiad, with no editing necessary, at least for viewers in the Eastern time zone.

Michael Phelps and the American gymnasts took care of the rest in the first week of the Games, providing the massive prime time audience with the ultimate reality television show that drove the numbers to truly Olympian heights. In the second week, Jamaica's Usain Bolt, a triple gold medalist, along with the American golden-girl beach volleyball babes, kept the momentum going, though the numbers did drop off after the human dolphin and the adorable tumbling pixies cleared the stage.

The IOC also agreed to another Ebersol initiative -- pushing up the start of the Games to early August, four weeks before they were initially scheduled -- to avoid bumping into NFL regular season football. That decision also provided an added bonus reflected in the number of eyeballs riveted to the Olympics, airing the Games at a time of year when millions of children could stay up late to watch without worrying about an early morning school bus wake-up call.

NBC mostly stuck to its all-sports-in-prime-time strategy, with an occasional puffy travelogue piece thrown into the mix, along with some incomprehensible cheerleading commentary from pronunciation-challenged gymnastics guru Bela Karolyi. One friend wrote that everything Bela said sounded to him like "gymaniacliableistance," save for his almost comical "rip off" riffs on the judges, especially when their decisions went against the American athletes.

Sadly, though, the nightly shows also virtually ignored important stories about China's role in squelching any and all protests, its shameful human rights record, oppressive big-brother security, a possible gymnastics scandal involving underage Chinese gymnasts, blocking journalists' access to controversial web sites on Tibet and Darfur and on and on.

The network almost surely would argue that its huge nightly numbers more than justified that decision to focus on sports over politics and other controversies, leaving those subjects to for its 30-minute Nightly News shows. But NBC's prime time coverage also presented the Games in an all-sports, no warts or worries vacuum -- something of a non-reality show if you will.

The same also could be said for the rah-rah coverage every morning on the Today Show, which regrettably turned into the official public relations and marketing arm for NBC Sports. Still, after ranting last week about so many of NBC's local and Olympic anchors making fools of themselves while attempting a wide variety Olympic sports, I couldn't help but laugh out loud watching Al Roker and Matt Lauer performing a (non) rhythmic gymnastics routine, leotards and all. Roker in a leotard? Now that's entertainment.

And now, a few words from our readers:

Hate: Your criticism concerning the Ralph Lauren logos (on U.S. team uniforms) in the Opening Ceremony. Are Nike, Puma or Reebok more discreet? I doubt it. Maybe we're just not used to a "lifestyle" brand being a protagonist. Like them or not, there's hardly a brand that represents Americana more than RL.