Ok. After Thursday, I was almost ready to cut NBC a break. Almost. Mostly because – are you listening, NBC? – Thursday night NBC took the wise step of showing LIVE SPORTS COVERAGE and reducing the number of irrelevant episodes about polar bears. I had, I decided, been a bit hasty in my judgment of NBC.
And then came Saturday night, where NBC shifted to showing us irrelevant video about, god help us, the Canadian Mounties, who, last I checked, are not an Olympic Event. This was, I am assured, to Teach Us About Canada. (I am continually amused by NBC's attempts to paint Canada as a foreign and exotic country, and not as the land of low drinking ages that I know and love.*) This was but one lowlight in an evening that largely went like this:
Men's short track: LIVE! ON TV! TREMENDOUSLY EXCITING!
Women's short track comes on. NBC immediately cuts to taped coverage of other events.
Men's short track: LIVE! ON TV! TREMENDOUSLY EXCITING! General agreement that we need more short track. Fortunately, the women are coming up –
NBC immediately cuts to taped coverage of other events.
This was the evening where
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tgregoryt fell asleep while watching, and really, it was difficult (for anyone other than an infuriated small grey cat) to blame him. But all of this paled to the utter incompetence that was the Sunday program. For those that missed it, and I am not blaming any of you, here's what happened:
Sunday afternoon: The Olympics debut a fabulously exciting new event, ski cross (basically, four downhillers leaping down the ski cross track at the same time, allowing you to really watch them race, plus, flying jumps and crashes.) Of this, we see only the qualification runs, which include just one skier shooting down the ski cross track at one time, not allowing anyone to really watch a race, live. The Olympics also have the Super Combined, where American Bode Miller took gold. Of this, we see nothing live, because, NBC has decided to show the Czech/Russia hockey game instead.
Which meant that, Sunday evening, since NBC had, it decided, already shown us hockey, it would instead fill the evening with taped coverage of the Super Combined and Ski Cross and more Inspiring Stories and occasional live shots of "Hi! I'm an ice dancer! Laugh at my costume!" until suddenly a freaked out NBC realized that it was missing the real story of the night, abruptly cutting into taped bobsled footage (with assurances that we'd get back to that) with "Whoops! So sorry we absolutely failed to show you the most exciting event of the night!" Grr.
Not that I'm a major fan of hockey, but, grr.
(For those reading in shock, and wondering, what has
happened to this blog, rest assured, we will be returning to our usual sports free blogging in one more week – until 2012.)
* I do freely admit to my Canadian readers that far too much of my impression of Canada was formed in merry carousing in Montreal. Where, I must add, we encountered surprisingly few Canadian Mounties given what we were doing.
