On Mon, Aug 2, 2021 at 3:36 PM Tom Wolper <[email protected]> wrote: > 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. > > I know there really wasn't anything new there. But I did think it was well written, and I did chuckle out loud a few times :-)
To be honest, I'm sure American viewers would find things annoying about British or Australian coverage of the games too. > 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. > Absolutely. You can always tell who has really done their homework and *knows* the sport fully, and who is basically winging it. I know a cycling commentator who spends hours and hours doing his prep on the route, the riders and everything else. Yes - the event organisers provide background information, but this is just vanilla. You need to have watched them in previous events so you can put their performances into perspective. Dig into their stats. Keep an eye on their social media. All that kind of thing. Certainly keep copious notes so that you can break out relevant facts when you need to - not everything has to be memorised. But also, don't use those facts when you don't need them. Badly produced sports/events sometimes have captions come up with useless information about competitors telling viewers that a competitor's favourite movie is Harry Potter and their favourite artist is Ed Sheeran. All that does is give you a rough idea of how old they probably are... > 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. > > > I have a particular allergy to anyone said to have "crashed out". If the #1 in the world is beaten in the opening round by the #297, then sure, use that term. But the #10 beating the #2 in the semi-finals is not an incredible upset. That sort of thing does - and should - happen. Four years - or five even - is an eternity for some sports where athletes' peaks are short lived. For them it's a bigger surprise if the same competitor even manages two straight Olympics, never mind winning gold at multiple games. Part of the joy of sport is that it's unscripted. But that probably doesn't help if you're busily junking 10 feature pieces you've already made and had planned to sprinkle across your coverage for the next week, when a favoured athlete fails early... -- 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/CAD_sJGDfwD44AJh8ov4QS_1CYBUOmQ3pPxyKx95ufhD8zACeVA%40mail.gmail.com.
