Watching the Winter Olympics …

Or not.

Whoever buys the rights to broadcast the Olympics pays a hefty tab. They need to recoup that by selling ads – I understand that.  Just business. 

At some point, however, you start to lose your audience when you lard up your programming with too many spots.  And when you invent short fluff segments for no other reason than to be a buffer between ads, you start to piss off your audience.

Then they do what I do – just DVR the whole night’s programming and fast-forward through all the BS the next day. That’s the only way I can watch the Olympics anymore.

I can skip past the events I don’t care for – and can’t understand why these are in the Olympics anyway – such as short-track speedskating, biathlon, curling, and cross-country skiing, among others. I also can’t understand why anyone, except maybe parents of competitors, wants to see lengthy coverage of training and qualifying runs, either; just show the final event, okay? 

The same goes for the “human interest” crap. I don’t care how competitors got started as kids, how they are best friends with their mom, how often their families moved to get them the best trainers, or, as they did the other night, how much Koreans love Jindos – a certain type of dog. 

They even showed a famous Korean statue of a Jindo. 

Notice they didn’t bring up how Koreans eat dogs, too. Maybe that statue is really in front of a Korean fast-food chain restaurant. Could it be Ronald McJindo? Or Jindo King?

Who knows? Better still, who cares?        

I don’t need to see competitors who have no business being there, with zero chance of anything other than showing how inept they are, just because their country gets to send someone. I don’t need to watch people born, raised, and trained in one country competing under the flag of another country, so they could get in the Olympics. How is someone from Chicago representing France? How is someone from Connecticut representing Nigeria? 

And I certainly don’t need to waste my time on novelty teams. Like the women’s bobsled team from Nigeria.  Or the “unified” North/South Korea women’s hockey team, that, for the record only scored a single goal – total – in all their games.

I don’t need Johnny Weir and Tara Lipinski opining on the outfits worn by the figure skaters and the music they’ll skate to.  Or their snappy repartee on which ridiculous outfit and hair style Johnny has deigned to grace us all with that night.  Or Katie Couric saying stupid things like the Dutch excel in skating because during the winter they commute to work on skates. Or the manufactured drama over whether this is Lindsey Vonn’s – or fill-in-the-blank’s – last Olympics. 

Does anyone else really give a damn?     

The only reason to watch the Olympics is supposedly to see the best athletes in the world. That’s simply not happening. The Olympics have devolved into a mind-boggling slog through hour upon hour of make-believe competitors representing their make-believe countries in make-believe sports, with tiny bits of action sandwiched between overwhelming layers of ads and useless filler.

I can’t imagine anyone willingly sitting through it all in real time. I can’t. I won’t.

Apparently, a lot of folks feel the same.  There was a news item today that for the first time in 25 years a network nightly newscast beat NBC’s Olympics coverage in the same time slot.

That’s going to wake up advertisers blowing billions on what’s little more than a sideshow. When people aren’t watching, they’re not getting their money’s worth. 

The eyeballs aren’t there. Mine included.