NEW YORK – US-based television network NBC broke its own previous Olympic record for broadcasting images of people hugging each other and/or crying yesterday, setting a new world-best mark in sports media production.
Tuesday’s coverage of the women’s football semi-final between Team USA and Canada included a full two hours of pre-game backstory on the lives of several key US players, profiling their hometowns and interviewing their proud parents and siblings. The broadcast’s 25 hugs and 12 images of people crying brought the network’s total hug/crying Olympic numbers to 652/399, tying it with NBC’s numbers from the 2008 Beijing Games.
When USA won the match on a dramatic last-minute header by Alex Morgan, NBC cut to live feeds from Morgan’s hometown to show her family and friends crying and hugging – setting a new world record.
“We’re extremely proud for having taken the Olympics, which is already a weepy, huggy schmaltz fest, to new heights of saccharine emotional manipulation,” said NBC spokesperson Chris McClosky. “When it comes to gratuitous hugs and weeping, no one beats NBC.”
“Or for that matter, the USA,” he added.
The network, which paid a record US$1.2 billion for the exclusive rights to broadcast the Games in the US, credits its record-breaking run to its dedicated vision of eliminating all competitive aspects of the sports from the Olympics and dialing up the human aspects of every athlete’s personal story until every drop of contrived emotion has been wrung from it like a soggy dishrag.
Beginning in 1988 with NBC’s coverage of the Seoul Games, the network has been steadily mastering the art of utterly feminizing the Olympics and making it unbearable and unwatchable for actual sports fans, while shattering records along the way for longest backstory segments, highest filler-to-sport ratio, and most girly cursive script used for on-screen labels.
NBC’s 2008 coverage of the women’s team gymnastics competition scored an astonishing 3.66% actual-sports quotient, with over 95% of TV minutes devoted to montages of past Team USA highlights, slow motion pans of the competitor’s bedrooms, and Bob Costas speaking in hushed, reverent tones. At the time it was regarded as the greatest single act of sports over-production in TV history.
However, even avid followers of NBC’s broadcasting capabilities have been impressed with their extraordinary 2012 performance.
“With five days left, including a high concentration of medal events, NBC could look at breaking the 1000/500 hug/weep mark, which was once thought of as impossible,” said Keeran Worley, a media analyst in New York. According to Worley, a 1000/500 score would be as historic as the 4-minute mile or the 10-second 100 meter dash, once thought impossible as well.
Other observers remain skeptical of the record-shattering performance, noting that coverage of the Games had changed over the years and that NBC was essentially cheating through technology.
“The 1984 Los Angeles Games actually had more hugs per minute of actual TV coverage,” said Deana Aingsley, an Olympic media historian. “NBC’s seemingly-impressive 2012 numbers include its streaming internet coverage – which, by the way, allows NBC to shove all the sports not involving non-Americans off its main primetime network coverage, and show all hugging and crying and no actual sports during that time. You can’t really compare yesterday to today.”
However, Aingsley did credit NBC with having revolutionized Olympics coverage into a modern product.
“The Games used to be about staying up late, celebrating athletic excellence, and feeling connected to other nations,” she said. “Now it’s all about fascist commercialization, packaged Hollywood endings, and the perpetuation of delusions about national greatness. Frankly, I don’t think we’ll see anyone top NBC in our lifetime.”
Rumors that NBC was experimenting with radical new hugging-and-weeping content, including the possible exploration of the personal lives of non-American Olympic athletes, was firmly denied by the network.
“The Olympics is not now, nor will ever be, about foreigners,” said McClosky.
