Olympics on NBC: a Primer

After one night of NBC Olympics coverage I understand the rhythm of their broadcast.

Winners First
Everything on their prime time show is tape delayed so they can show the events in any order they want. The first events shown will have Americans, marquee Americans if possible, winning heroically. Any event shown after 11:30 will have Americans losers.

Commercialization
If a marquee athlete is going to lose a headline event ads featuring him will be run before the event.  If the marquee athlete wins a shitload of commercials featuring him will run immediately after the event. The advertisers pay extra for this prime placement.

Puff...Puff...Umm...Wheeze
NBC loves interviewing athletes immediately after the event when they are still desperately trying to catch their breath. The interviews consist almost entirely of random cliches punctuated by heavy panting. They also have....

Andrea Kramer
I swear to God I don't know how she got, let alone held onto, a job in broadcasting. Andrea is the queen of inane questions. However, when Lewis Johnson and Dwight Stones start interviewing track and field athletes they promise to make Andrea sound like a genius.

Not Chris Collinsworth (I hope)
This is the good news. Collinsworth was a grand waste of time with feature stories where a wooden personality tried to make one-dimensional full-time athletes sound interesting. The bad news is that he has been replaced with Ryan Seacrest and John McEnroe and as bad as Collinsworth was Seacrest and McEnroe are much worse.

Twitter
Seacrest, apparently, also is going to have a nightly feature where he tells us what the hot Tweets were because, damn that's exciting!!!!!!!

As before, the best part of the Olympics are the athletics. The worst part is NBC putting us all to sleep with fluff.