It's sports vs. human interest stories during NBC's Olympics

It must kill NBC Sports honcho Dick Ebersol that all the Olympic drama has to be interrupted all the time by showing those darn sporting events.

The big question of this Olympics is enunciated by William Hastback of Smithtown: "In any given hour, will 'Survivor' have shown more actual semi-athletic events competition than any given hour of the Olympics on NBC?"

A new wrinkle for prognosticators will be the ratings competition between "Survivor" and the Olympics. "They are both highly produced reruns," as Jon Mittelhauser of Los Gatos, California, explained. "One just happens to be months old, and the other 12 hours old."

"Even 'Survivor' reruns will be better than watching 24 gymnasts doing the exact same thing as before for three hours," according to Olympics scholar Brian Stephens. "The Olympics hold as much appeal as watching 'Big Brother.'"

As I doze off through the endless biographical profiles and NBC's other glitzy attempts to make the story bigger than the sports themselves, I expect to be revisited by another dream, or perhaps nightmare, as NBC Sports might call it. Some day some genius will come to them with a newfangled idea: Why not show the actual sports instead of a soap opera?

The usual excuse is that the American people, especially young women, aren't interested in sports. They are pandering to demographics.

And they have evidence to prove it this time. PAX network, another arm of the NBC octopus, has been running the Olympic trials (June 3 to September 2), and the ratings weren't so good, which can mean either one of two things: Nobody is interested in sports, or they can't find PAX.

I'm surprised George W. Bush didn't suggest they hold the presidential debate during halftime at a volleyball match between Nigeria and Argentina on PAX.

New records in not showing sports, I predict, will be set by NBC this year. That is because they will spend half their time telling us how wonderful it is they will be showing sports at various odd hours on MSNBC and CNBC. But what if you don't have cable or have that other impediment -- being employed -- which might make it difficult to catch the games in the morning or after midnight?

I still think it's criminal that NBC doesn't follow the method used by other broadcasters throughout the world. The games come first. Show the world's best athletes in their prime in the best prime times.

My suggestion is they put all the soap operas on MSNBC and CNBC -- to amortize the $3.5-billion NBC overpaid for the prize -- and put the real sports on the network in prime time. NBC's priorities are all skewed up.

Let the commercials begin!

Kitman is the television critic for New York Newsday. His column appears regularly on CNN Interactive's Entertainment section. E-mail Kitman at MarvinKitmanShow@worldnet.att.net

(c) 2000, Newsday Inc. Distributed by Los Angeles Times Syndicate.

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NBC: Olympics

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