On Mon, Aug 2, 2021 at 9:41 AM Adam Bowie <[email protected]> wrote:
> This piece by an Aussie journalist who works in America amused me. > Spoiler: He's not an NBC super-fan - > https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2021/aug/02/nbc-olympic-coverage-peacock-replays-primetime > A lot of his criticisms are the same ones we've had on this list going back to our beginning. NBC inherited its primetime Olympic coverage from ABC's Roone Arledge playbook and they have trained US viewers to want and appreciate that style of coverage. The quick cuts from live events to replays and incoherent coverage, while annoying to him, are exciting to US viewers who aren't invested in the sports or know how other countries cover the games. A lot of the annoying things like sponsor mentions and meaningless interviews are ambient to the average viewer, who doesn't see them as annoying at all. Right now I have two minor gripes about the coverage: every announcing team in any sport gets a media packet from the team, league, federation, etc. In it are some notes about players or athletes. Announcers read the notes as part of their prep and good ones use them when there's a lull in the action or they want to draw attention to a certain player. Below average announcers use them in a way that reminds you that the announcer doesn't have insight to a player based on research or conversations, but they're just reading notes from a media packet. There's way too much of this note reading in NBC coverage. Usually it comes when the camera is showing competitors one by one at the pool's starting platform or runners at the blocks. The announcer will say the competitor's name and home country and then add a note that seems to come out of nowhere. My other gripe, which comes from news coverage more than NBC, is hearing/seeing every day about shockers and upsets. In an elite competition anybody can win, especially with the tight margins at the Olympics, and world champions or previous gold medal winners are not entitled to win their events. It makes for fun TV to see someone unexpected win and exhilarating to watch their surprise, but when I look at sports headlines in the early morning and it's full of "shockers," it bugs me. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TVorNotTV" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tvornottv/CAJE-FiE9O-SsPeEtfi3%2B3zjE3p-FNcjqWGWiPeV7t5%2BRdgvy4g%40mail.gmail.com.
