STORIES..............SOB
As Reese Witherspoon perkily reminded us in "Election," Henry David Thoreau once said, "I may not be able to make my days longer, but I can sure make them better." (or something like that).
The "networks of NBC" (Universal HD, USA, MSNBC, CNBC, NBCTV, and NBCTVHD) have tried to one-up Thoreau by actually making the days of the Winter Olympics longer; the combined hours of coverage these networks offer is 416 hours (which is more than 24 hours a day). Therefore, NBC has actually extended the hourly length of a TV day (it shows roughly 25 hours of Olympic programming a day).
This statistic would be notable (in a positive way) if those twenty-five hours consisted of nothing but actual live footage of the various sporting events. After all, on any given day, when you add up the total number of hours expended in each competition for that day, you're probably not going to arrive at a sum much greater than, oh, I'd say about 40. 25/40=5/8=roughly 60%. Not bad.
But, as anyone who has ever watched even a morsel of Olympic competition knows, the only reason why NBC has seemingly one-upped Thoreau is because a substantial portion - probably at least eight of its 25 hours-a-day-coverage (not counting commercials) is what is politely referred to in the network news business as "filler."
The channel known as NBC itself is, of all of the networks of NBC, the most offensive presenter of filler. The filler is presented to us in two principal ways, interspersed within NBC's highly edited, tape-delayed, souped up, manfactured-suspensed afternoon and nightly programming:
1. NBC Olympic hosts and commentators will tell us what is going to happen (or what they idiotically think is going to happen) during an event. They then tell us what happens (sometimes in excruciatingly laughable detail) while the event happens, instead of letting the action (and some appropriately restrained commentary) speak for itself (by the way, while the action is going on, they also tell us what they thought was going to happen, and tell us, ad infinitum, what they think will happen when the event is over), and, once the event is over, tell us what has happened. This kind of repetitive dopeyness is not tolerated in the televising of other events (do baseball sportscasters indulge in lengthy pre- and post-game analysis while holding the audience, who does not know when the next event will begin until the commentators shut up, captive? Do football commentators engage in before play-by play, during play-by-play, and after play-by play analysis? Please). This kind of dopeyness is also anathema to good fiction (telling someone what they're going to see, then telling them they're seeing it, then telling them what they saw leaches the imagination out of good drama and leaves little room for the impramatur of creativity).
Why does NBC pad out its programming in this manner? For two reasons, I guess. Reason 1 is that it believes its audience is a bunch of idiots who cannot follow the events unless it pre, during, and post-choreographs them. This is insulting to the viewer's intelligence. People today watch television shows with multiple plot lines, character arcs, and even sproadically tune in to shows that require daily watching for maximum appreciation - and yet somehow - are able to keep up. They can understand what is going on in Olympic events that have been shown for years without the patronizing exposition.
The second reason: since the padding out is done by NBC, in its own words, to maximize ratings and to assure higher advertising revenues (in other words, it wants to broadcast from 8-12 every night, regardless of who is offended if he can't watch "Joey"), NBC is keenly conscious of what it must do (or what it believes it must do) to make the advertisers as happy as possible. Apparently, NBC and the advertisers have arrived at the mutually shared belief, as the spliced and diced footage demonstrates, that audiences don't want to actually watch sports when watching a sporting event. For example, say the men's luge competiton is on Sunday night. If this event takes three hours to run, only one hour of actual sports will be shown. The padding surrounding the event will take at least that long. Is it presumtuous of me to think that people who tune in to the Olympics might actually want to watch more sports and less talk about them? NBC might say "no," but this conclusion represents a prophecy that it refuses to be tested.
2. The second kind of padding (which can exist separately, or sometimes, within the same sentence, as the first kind) is what, until recently, Olympics watchers would call "sob stories" - mini-documentaries about athletes about to participate in an event that tell us how the athlete has overcome some horrific tragedy to be where he/she is today. NBC, perhaps listening to criticism (from whom, I don't know) that basically stated that such stories threatened to transform the Olympic Games into a race not for a medal but for what viewer would want to be embalmed most quickly, has cut back a little bit in terms of its hours of broadcasting sob stories. This year, we still have "stories," but not all of them necessarily are meant to evoke a sob (many of them do, however, all the same, simply because we want them to get off the screen). This year's stories still center around athletes who have overcome congenital/genital disease, persecution (self-inflicted or otherwise), privilege, poverty, puberty, perfection, starvation (all evidence to the contrary, in the case of some athletes we see competing, and bear in mind more than one camera is pointing at them while they are competing), marital/familial discord, harmony, superior education, small-town life, big-city life, the curse of only being best in the world for only ten years instead of fifteen, getting only the silver medal at the last Olympics, winning only three golds at the last Olympics instead of four, not vomiting before competing, and so on. Sob. Many of the stories feature something new: an athlete triumphing over bureaucracy - getting that U.S. citizenship/Visa at the last minute, moving from one's native country to a neighboring country because of the realization that the move is the only way to secure a medal (the triumph here again is in obtaining the visa, and, presumably, in successfully "forum shopping" - how inspiring!); having one's parent lobby one's country's Olympic Committee to keep a rival off the country's team for a particular event (call this one a silent clubbing). These stories REALLY make me want to cry. They really are of little interest to the average Olympics viewer, I suspect, and merely constitute padding on top of double padding.
The whole sob/bureaucracy stories try to hammer a lesson/point down our throats, but I'd trade a million of those for the searing resonance produced upon seeing one of these victimized athletes win, do well, or even just show up (or in the case of some, just shut up).
Abraham Lincoln once said (appreciatively, I do not know), to the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe, "So you're the little lady that started this great big civil war?" Gustave Flaubert, the French author of Madame Bovary, left no doubt as to what he thought of Ms. Stowe and Uncle Tom's Cabin, a tract against slavery. "Why is the author constantly railing against slavery," he said. "Just depict it, that's enough."
If NBC "just depicted it," the triple padding - more suited to a lunatic village than an Olympic one - would disappear.
The "networks of NBC" (Universal HD, USA, MSNBC, CNBC, NBCTV, and NBCTVHD) have tried to one-up Thoreau by actually making the days of the Winter Olympics longer; the combined hours of coverage these networks offer is 416 hours (which is more than 24 hours a day). Therefore, NBC has actually extended the hourly length of a TV day (it shows roughly 25 hours of Olympic programming a day).
This statistic would be notable (in a positive way) if those twenty-five hours consisted of nothing but actual live footage of the various sporting events. After all, on any given day, when you add up the total number of hours expended in each competition for that day, you're probably not going to arrive at a sum much greater than, oh, I'd say about 40. 25/40=5/8=roughly 60%. Not bad.
But, as anyone who has ever watched even a morsel of Olympic competition knows, the only reason why NBC has seemingly one-upped Thoreau is because a substantial portion - probably at least eight of its 25 hours-a-day-coverage (not counting commercials) is what is politely referred to in the network news business as "filler."
The channel known as NBC itself is, of all of the networks of NBC, the most offensive presenter of filler. The filler is presented to us in two principal ways, interspersed within NBC's highly edited, tape-delayed, souped up, manfactured-suspensed afternoon and nightly programming:
1. NBC Olympic hosts and commentators will tell us what is going to happen (or what they idiotically think is going to happen) during an event. They then tell us what happens (sometimes in excruciatingly laughable detail) while the event happens, instead of letting the action (and some appropriately restrained commentary) speak for itself (by the way, while the action is going on, they also tell us what they thought was going to happen, and tell us, ad infinitum, what they think will happen when the event is over), and, once the event is over, tell us what has happened. This kind of repetitive dopeyness is not tolerated in the televising of other events (do baseball sportscasters indulge in lengthy pre- and post-game analysis while holding the audience, who does not know when the next event will begin until the commentators shut up, captive? Do football commentators engage in before play-by play, during play-by-play, and after play-by play analysis? Please). This kind of dopeyness is also anathema to good fiction (telling someone what they're going to see, then telling them they're seeing it, then telling them what they saw leaches the imagination out of good drama and leaves little room for the impramatur of creativity).
Why does NBC pad out its programming in this manner? For two reasons, I guess. Reason 1 is that it believes its audience is a bunch of idiots who cannot follow the events unless it pre, during, and post-choreographs them. This is insulting to the viewer's intelligence. People today watch television shows with multiple plot lines, character arcs, and even sproadically tune in to shows that require daily watching for maximum appreciation - and yet somehow - are able to keep up. They can understand what is going on in Olympic events that have been shown for years without the patronizing exposition.
The second reason: since the padding out is done by NBC, in its own words, to maximize ratings and to assure higher advertising revenues (in other words, it wants to broadcast from 8-12 every night, regardless of who is offended if he can't watch "Joey"), NBC is keenly conscious of what it must do (or what it believes it must do) to make the advertisers as happy as possible. Apparently, NBC and the advertisers have arrived at the mutually shared belief, as the spliced and diced footage demonstrates, that audiences don't want to actually watch sports when watching a sporting event. For example, say the men's luge competiton is on Sunday night. If this event takes three hours to run, only one hour of actual sports will be shown. The padding surrounding the event will take at least that long. Is it presumtuous of me to think that people who tune in to the Olympics might actually want to watch more sports and less talk about them? NBC might say "no," but this conclusion represents a prophecy that it refuses to be tested.
2. The second kind of padding (which can exist separately, or sometimes, within the same sentence, as the first kind) is what, until recently, Olympics watchers would call "sob stories" - mini-documentaries about athletes about to participate in an event that tell us how the athlete has overcome some horrific tragedy to be where he/she is today. NBC, perhaps listening to criticism (from whom, I don't know) that basically stated that such stories threatened to transform the Olympic Games into a race not for a medal but for what viewer would want to be embalmed most quickly, has cut back a little bit in terms of its hours of broadcasting sob stories. This year, we still have "stories," but not all of them necessarily are meant to evoke a sob (many of them do, however, all the same, simply because we want them to get off the screen). This year's stories still center around athletes who have overcome congenital/genital disease, persecution (self-inflicted or otherwise), privilege, poverty, puberty, perfection, starvation (all evidence to the contrary, in the case of some athletes we see competing, and bear in mind more than one camera is pointing at them while they are competing), marital/familial discord, harmony, superior education, small-town life, big-city life, the curse of only being best in the world for only ten years instead of fifteen, getting only the silver medal at the last Olympics, winning only three golds at the last Olympics instead of four, not vomiting before competing, and so on. Sob. Many of the stories feature something new: an athlete triumphing over bureaucracy - getting that U.S. citizenship/Visa at the last minute, moving from one's native country to a neighboring country because of the realization that the move is the only way to secure a medal (the triumph here again is in obtaining the visa, and, presumably, in successfully "forum shopping" - how inspiring!); having one's parent lobby one's country's Olympic Committee to keep a rival off the country's team for a particular event (call this one a silent clubbing). These stories REALLY make me want to cry. They really are of little interest to the average Olympics viewer, I suspect, and merely constitute padding on top of double padding.
The whole sob/bureaucracy stories try to hammer a lesson/point down our throats, but I'd trade a million of those for the searing resonance produced upon seeing one of these victimized athletes win, do well, or even just show up (or in the case of some, just shut up).
Abraham Lincoln once said (appreciatively, I do not know), to the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe, "So you're the little lady that started this great big civil war?" Gustave Flaubert, the French author of Madame Bovary, left no doubt as to what he thought of Ms. Stowe and Uncle Tom's Cabin, a tract against slavery. "Why is the author constantly railing against slavery," he said. "Just depict it, that's enough."
If NBC "just depicted it," the triple padding - more suited to a lunatic village than an Olympic one - would disappear.
posted by EnterCenter at 12:07 PM
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