Unhelpful

Imagine you were watching an Olympic hockey game on NBC. You’re watching a delayed broadcast because the geniuses at the network don’t want to show live events, they’d rather show you delayed events chock full of biographical essays.

Halfway into the game you’re watching, you see a news update that they stick in just before they leave a commercial break.

Including, incidentally, the final score of the game you’re watching.
Fucking genius.

US Olympic coverage sucks ass. The IOC would be doing a service to the US television audience by not selling exclusive rights to a single US network for official coverage; it would be the biggest fucking favor in all of modern sporting history. Let any and all networks fight it out and let them cover it their own way. Maybe, just maybe, one of them would manage not to dick it up beyond recognition.

In the past, US coverage was criticized for only showing the “popular” events, almost never showing anything live, and including endless biographical sketches about US athletes. After several cycles of coverage in this fashion, people started to complain, and the solution is such a winner: NOW THEY DO BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES ABOUT US AND NON-US ATHLETES, TOO!

When the games were in Australia or Japan, I can understand delaying coverage of events for the US market, but in addition to live coverage, not instead of. If it’s so important to the US audience to have a trillion goddamn biographies in their Olympic coverage, maybe they could show it at the expense of some of the oversold commercial time rather than cutting into actual coverage. Better yet, co-brand coverage with the Lifetime Channel (Television for Women!) and show all the biographical fluff there where it won’t be pissing me off.

Enter: Canadian television. Real events. Live. Even the weird ones. Even the ones without any hopes for US or Canadian gold. Curling owns you. Period. Even if it is Canadian.

How can a combination of shuffleboard and household chores not own? The bowler pushes a gigantic granite stone down a field, and lets it fly. The rest of the team sweeps ahead of the stone with brooms to influence its travel. How fucking sloshed do you have to be to come up with something like that? I wish it were cheap to get into like bowling, because I bet it makes a magnificent drinking game.

It’s the best sport ever. Aside from feeding Christians to lions.

Argue