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Monday, February 20, 2006
Turin Olympics melting on NBC
As we head into the second and final week of the Winter Olympics, NBC’s hope of turning around its low-rated season have collapsed like over-hyped alpine skier Bode Miller.
The prime-time coverage, anchored by Bob Costas, has succumbed to regular series on a regular basis. Last week it was trounced on Thursday night by Fox’s “American Idol” and soundly beaten by ABC’s “Dancing with the Stars” and CBS’s ancient “Survivor.”
On Sunday night, “Desperate Housewives” and “Grey’s Anatomy” were way more popular than bobsledding or ice dancing.
The first week of the Olympics averaged 20.8 million viewers each night — down a dramatic 35 percent from Salt Lake City in 2002. Home games traditionally perform better than “away games,” but the Turin-based Olympics also are down more than 20 percent from the ‘98 games in Nagano, Japan.
The sagging interest can only partly be blamed on Michelle Kwan’s precompetition departure. Or Miller’s implosion. Or speedskaters Shani Davis and Chad Hedrick’s playground feud. Or snowboarder Lindsey Jacobellis’ ill-timed hot-dogging.
As I’ve whined about before, the biggest complaint I’m hearing this time around is the packaging of the time-delayed events. It’s impossible to get excited about speedskating or even the normally wildly popular figure skating when the heats and individuals are interrupted by other sports. A downhill here, a cross-country there, a skeleton and luge sprinkled in between.
There’s no flow to this coverage, and people are no longer willing to sit through three or four hours of other stuff to get to what they want to see. There are too many options — nonrerun programming on other networks and Olympic results all over the Internet.
The days of Olympics dominance are gone, and NBC needs to factor that into its coverage. Show two or three competitions from start to finish, a plan that is exceedingly simple because everything is tape-delayed anyway.
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