Live from Paris, it's the return of the big-time Olympics whenever and wherever on NBC's platforms
NBC host Mike Tirico attends the red carpet ahead of the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games on July 26, 2024 in Paris, France. Credit: Getty Images/Matthew Stockman
The best sports show on television these days airs daily from around 2:30 to 4:30 p.m., a fast-paced soap opera full of dramatic developments.
It is NBC’s live coverage of the Olympic Games in Paris, which is six hours ahead of New York, so France’s prime time at night translates into our prime time in the afternoon.
The result is a compressed diet of event finals from around the Games, notably in marquee sports such as swimming, gymnastics and track and field.
Credit to NBC for the way it has handled this. The old strategy would have called for withholding coverage until prime time here, when more people can watch.
Instead, the network has treated viewers with the respect they deserve – and has accepted the reality of media in 2024 – by taking the afternoon show seriously.
Mike Tirico hosts it, doing double duty before also anchoring at night, a signal of the time slot’s importance to NBC. And it works.
“It’s great to see in the afternoon, Paris Prime, as we’ve called it, where we’ve seen enormous numbers,” NBC Sports president Rick Cordella said on a conference call with reporters last week.
“Our strategy of making everything available live in the afternoon with fully produced, prime-time quality productions across our widest platforms, the biggest events, it’s something we’ve never done before.”
Traditional sports fans forever have complained about prime-time coverage being sliced, diced and curated into a pretty package designed for a broader audience.
That still is happening.
So watching at night means never knowing exactly when an event occurred, or in what sequence, in real life or when a “Saturday Night Live” promotion might turn up randomly, or when we will get the latest iteration of NBC’s strange obsession with Snoop Dogg.
That’s fine, because NBCUniversal is delivering the goods elsewhere.
You want to see whatever you want whenever you want? Peacock is doing that as NBC’s streaming arm, as is NBCOlympics.com for authenticated viewers.
Example: NBC ignored most of the men’s pole vault final on Monday during its live track coverage. I had a specific interest in the event. What to do?
I went to NBCOlympics.com and watched every minute of it. Problem solved.
Meanwhile, secondary channels have provided coverage of the sort of events that Americans tend to notice only once every four years.
On Tuesday night, there was no point in watching the curated show on NBC since I already knew the results. So off to USA Network I went, and watched field hockey and team handball matches from earlier in the day.
With Americans excelling in many events and just enough drama from other nations to add variety, the Games have been an artistic and journalistic success.
More than anything else, the entire thing seems so . . . normal.
With COVID-19 restrictions mostly in the past and the Games back in Western Europe, the Olympics feel like a big deal again.
Trying to explain and/or analyze the viewership data given the modern metrics NBC is using would require a graduate level statistics course.
Let’s just leave it at this: These Olympics have drawn widespread interest, and NBC is ecstatic.
“Clearly, the Olympics are back,” NBCUniversal Media Group chairman Mark Lazarus said. “It reminds me and those of us who were in London in 2012 of the enthusiasm that the crowds have here and what the excitement is at home.”
NBC first offered every event live via streaming in 2012, a groundbreaking move at the time. But that was bare-bones stuff.
Now the afternoon television show is even creating its own announcing stars, such as gymnastics analyst Laurie Hernandez.
Peacock also has fully evolved after its uneven rollout for the Tokyo Olympics, with popular features such as “Gold Zone.”
Not everyone can take advantage of live sports on weekday afternoons, of course. But compared to the pre-COVID era, far more people are working remotely these days and presumably can at least take peeks at the Games during the day.
It has not been perfect, which it never can be for an event of this magnitude.
But given where the Olympics have been recently – especially in 2021 and ’22, when interest cratered – it is nice to have them back.
Especially when they are live.
Neil Best first worked at Newsday in 1982, returned in 1985 after a detour to Alaska and has been here since, specializing in high schools, college basketball, the NFL and most recently sports media and business.
