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Critiquing the Olympic Critics

Both the New Yorker and the Columbus Dispatch have their Olympic coverage stories out. I lean closer to the view of Molly Willow of the Dispatch fame, the tv critic who has good taste in television.

I thought: why am I able to watch this Olympics when past ones left me cold?

Answer: no lengthy, painful, melodramatic "set-up" stories that last longer than the events themselves. As Willow puts it:

Perhaps the biggest difference between NBC's coverage of these games and the last in Athens, Greece, is the smart reduction in long, saccharine profiles of athletes.

Instead, brief bios have filled the lulls between high-profile events, helping to ensure that viewers stay up well past their bedtimes.

Nancy Franklin in the New Yorker also has a few good lines:

In the four years since I was last forced to watch beach volleyball, I somehow have not found the maturity and wisdom to take it seriously as an Olympic sport, and, frankly, I doubt that NBC takes it seriously, either, except as a ratings grabber. Every time I turned on the TV, there was May-Treanor (the short one) and Walsh (the tall one), in those silly little Victoria’s Ill-Kept Secret outfits. I now know more about these two women than I know about some of my relatives...

Including their anatomy. I was amused that even that bastion of liberal propriety, NPR, got into the controversy of whether the bikinis were for comfort or ratings. Beach volleyball was way overcovered (by NBC that is) but I was glad for it because it allowed me to focus only on the swimming and the women's gymnastics. You can't watch 3000 hours of coverage so NBC actually did me a solid. Meanwhile, I could also relate to Franklin's take on "where's China?":

Watching the Beijing Olympics, for all the athletic and architectural spectacularity on display, has turned out to be more frustrating than I expected. What an opportunity this was—not, as is obvious, just for China but for the rest of the world, the people whose only chance to visit China would be through the lenses of NBC’s cameras. Thirty-six hundred hours of sports and features filled the network and its cable sisters CNBC, MSNBC, USA, Telemundo, Oxygen, and Universal HD, and the Web—but I feel as though all I saw of China on TV was tourists walking on the Great Wall and correspondents eating, or not eating, “funny” food like fried scorpions.