It’s that time again, those couple of weeks every couple of years where the Olympics overrun the world and our televisions insist that John Z. Hefferpfeffer in curling and Jane B. Poopensniffer in bobsledding are international megastars who deserve their rightful place next to Babe Ruth and Michael Jordan in the pantheon of legendary sportsmen.

Normally, the fact that fawning announcers could say with a straight face that somebody who pushes a rock down an ice patch is laden with abundant “natural talent” would be ridiculous enough for me to write a blog post. But that’s not my complaint here. Sometimes I actually do enjoy the distraction of the Olympics, with its weird little “sports” and human interest stories. I’ve watched at least part of every Olympics since 1984, if I remember right. At least it’s a little something different from the norm. So what if literally nobody cares who ends up being crowned the best in the world at steering a little sled down a frozen water slide? It’s kinda fun to watch.

Or at least it would be if we could watch it. The internet is currently chock full of articles regarding NBC’s massive failure at broadcasting this year’s Winter Olympics. And let me tell you – they’re all completely right. Following any particular sport and its results is a total exercise in futility. It is impossible to familiarize oneself with any certain competition and its participants, because you’ll see about 10% of that event…if you’re lucky. In its zeal to attempt to show its viewers everything, NBC has instead managed to show them nothing. Any random hour of “Olympic” “broadcasting” might contain 9 minutes of ice dancing, followed by 6 minutes of commercials, followed by 11 minutes of skiing, followed by another 6 minutes of commercials, 8 minutes of bobsledding, 8 minutes of commercials, 10 minutes of curling and finally 4 minutes of commercials. The Olympics, everybody!!!

Apparently NBC has decided to cater to the “I don’t care about any of these events or sports; I just want to watch some people out in the snow” crowd. Closely following the Luging competition? Well, you’re shit-outta-luck, because you’re going to see about 2 performances before they cut away to 5-minute blocks of 14 other sports. Three hours later, you might get lucky enough to catch the finals of Luging, with little explanation of what happened in between the beginning and the end; which is sorta like Fox showing the first 5 minutes of the first quarter of the Super Bowl, cutting away to the Puppy Bowl and Bud Bowl, and then coming back to the last 2 minutes of the fourth quarter of the Super Bowl.

Back in the old days of television, this kind of thing could be explained, because how are you going to show everything that you want to when you have 30 million events and just one channel? But that’s not today’s reality. NBC also has the “backup channel” of MSNBC to help cover the Olympics, as well as their live streaming capabilities of their websites. So why does watching a multi-billion-dollar corporation’s attempts at covering the Games feel akin to getting yanked around by that  annoying friend with no attention span who constantly wants to see “what’s happening on the next hill”? You barely get a taste of one competition before it’s dismissed with a casual “we’ll be back to so-and-so in a while, but first, a minute’s worth of 50 other events, brought to you by NBC. We are TOTALLY not dropping the ball here. Right? RIGHT???”

The other side effect of NBC’s coverage is one of my worst pet peeves – commercials. It’s estimated that NBC will lose approximately $250 million by broadcasting the Olympics (the broadcast contract cost nearly $1 billion), but that they were eager to win the contract due to a hoped-for “Olympic halo”. The theory here is that last-place NBC will receive some residual viewership for their usual lineups from people too lazy to change the channel after “watching” the Olympics. Even still, how does a network try to recoup a multi-million dollar loss? By showing commercials constantly. And by constantly, I mean after practically every heat of every race.

Add in that annoying little worm Bob Costas, whose hosting of the Olympics is another mostly-failed effort to prove that he knows anything about anything besides baseball. His over-the-top “Ken Burns Baseball” voice strains to place historical importance on every event, no matter how actually mundane and inconsequential it is in reality. I’m not interested in hearing how the fate of the world hangs in the balance according to how the Speed Skating 1000 meter quarterfinals play out. To add to the viewing agony, every hour or so he’ll trot out the Bobsledding silver medalist in the 1948 Olympics or the Flower Arranging winner in the 1936 Games so they can tell some aw-shucks, “things sure were different back in my day”, knee slappers while the producers are feverishly setting up yet another round of car commercials in the control room.

Leora isn’t an avid follower of the Olympics, but she does enjoy watching the figure skating. When tonight’s Olympic coverage began, the program info stated that the coverage block would “feature” figure skating. And it sure did “feature” it. We saw a total of TWO performers skate before NBC cut to commercials and then….downhill skiing. Nice work, NBC. You win the gold, silver, and bronze in failed programming.