The Olympics. NBC. Married By Satan

February 16, 2010 at 3:32 pm (Uncategorized) (america bashing, nbc, Olympics)

When you live on the West Coast it hits you pretty early that you are treated as the red-headed stepchild when it comes to television programming. Well, if that red-headed stepchild was Christina Hendricks then I would be willing to let it slide.

Rawr.

Meow.

(Insert animal sound)

Anyways, as the years have passed and Twitter and Facebook have become more acceptable forms of communication, I have had to pull myself away from them from the hours of 5pm and 8pm Pacific Standard time so no one blurts out that Hurley ate Locke and then drove a Dharma bus off of a cliff that landed in a hospital that Jack was working in 1978 on Lost.

Oh. Spoiler.

I can live with that. We live in an era of now and people always have to talk about what they see with NO REGARD FOR PEOPLE IN DIFFERENT TIME ZONES. Ahem. It’s a part of life that you have to deal with when it’s 75 degrees on a February afternoon. I can get over it. Then this year I got excited. Anyone that knows me knows I’m a huge Olympics fan. The Winter games especially. The pageantry! The National Pride! The unfortunate men’s figure skating questions about homosexuality! Bring it on! Not only was it Olympic time it is happening now, in Vancouver, on this continent! No more tape delay nonsense and showing things where you already know the winner hours in advance. The games of Vancouver Olympiad would be live and mostly in color, unless you own a black and white tv, which in that case you should probably just move to Mars.

Astronaut ice cream is overrated.

On Sunday, it was time for Apolo Anton Ohno to race for glory. A chance to become the first man with a soul patch to increase NBC’s primetime viewership since Deal or No Deal started and Howie Mandel made it cool to fist bump. I sat down, turned on the TV and mine eyes were ready for the glory! What did I see?!?!?!

Show Business with Bart and Guber

BART AND GUBER!! What kind of Olympic sport is movie reviewing? This raised many questions. Where did Ebert place? What about smug ass Roeper? I would give that guy the silver medal for glibness. (The Gold? Matt Lauer, of course.) NBC, in their infinite wisdom, decided that it would be better to only run it live on the East and Central time zones and hold it for tape delay for the West Coast. Oh that’s cool since the Olympics are….

ON THE WEST COAST!

The games aren’t in Singapore or Beirut. We have to run it on tape delay because according to NBC, “People would rather watch it in primetime”. What year does NBC think it is? Hey guess what, the results aren’t being airlifted to the United States by carrier pigeon or stork. You can log onto Twitter or Facebook or any other website on the Internet and find the winners right away. Maybe you should show it live you idiots. Just to show how stupid it is, if you live in Seattle you are less than 3 hours from Vancouver. But you won’t be able to see the event on NBC until 6 hours after it ended. Pretty smart! This is like living in your parent’s house, they throw you a birthday party, but they don’t tell you about it until the next day after all the cake has been eaten and they already gave away your SuperSoaker Power 3000 that you always wanted.

Stop yelling at me!

Flashbacks.

Then to top it off, yesterday, with live skiing, speedskating and snowboarding happening during the day, NBC decided to not show any of it and wait until nighttime to show you something that ended 3 hours before on the East coast and 6 hours before on the West coast. Wait, I can’t concentrate since my sundial isn’t working and it’s my only reliable way of telling time in 1874.

NBC has decided they will show you what they want to, when they want to show it to you. In Canada, they have 12 dedicated channels to the Olympics and are showing all the events live all the time. In the US, the people on the West Coast may as well be watching the Olympics in August. “Oooh, a bobsled! I’ve heard about these Olympic type contraptions.” NBC has taken an event 4 years in the making and made a complete joke out of it. Families of Olympians that couldn’t travel have to wait hours upon hours to see their loved ones compete for something. But that’s not what this is about. This is about one thing.

NBC giving Americans the middle finger.

NBC should just change their logo to the peacock pulling his pants down and peeing on the American population. You want to watch things as they happen? That’s insane! We’ll show you something that happened in 1996 and pretend it’s live! NBC, go eff yourself. Way to ruin something that happens once every 4 years. What’s next? Firing Conan O’Brien?

Oh.