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T A B L E__T A L K

Will Jane ever live up to it's older sister Sassy? Discuss the latest young women's mag to hit the stands in Table Talk

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R E C E N T L Y

More is less
By Charles Taylor
"Titanic's" Oscar stampede points to a Hollywood future full of bloat and mediocrity
(02/11/98)

Come back, O.J., all is forgiven
By Vivienne Walt
Finally, L.A., gets a piece of the Lewinsky action, but not very much
(02/10/98)

Whitewater, mon amour
By Patricia Marx
Confession of an illicit romance with Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr
(02/09/98)

Let them make porn!
By Michelle Goldberg
Newly flush ex-scud stud Arthur Kent scolds Tom Brokaw and GE for running NBC News like a brothel
(02/06/98)

Red Planet
By James Surowiecki
Celebrity owners can't save Planet Hollywood from an invasion of red ink
(02/05/98)

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BROWSE THE
MEDIA CIRCUS
ARCHIVES

BY DANIEL RADOSH | Who can forget the all-chrome pickup trucks that toted wholesome Southern cheerleaders into the opening ceremonies or John Tesh's weepy tales of family heartbreak that preceded the performance of each and every anorexic gymnast? Ah, that was the summer of 1996 and NBC's coverage of the Atlanta Olympics milked a combination of Vegas-style spectacle and sentimental myth-making.

At the time, I found it all fairly repellent/unctuous, lightweight and depressingly corny. Now, after nearly one week of CBS's presentation of the Winter Games, I realize it could have been even worse. It could have been simply boring.

I sensed trouble from host Jim Nantz's very first words: "We are coming to you live from Nagano, Japan, and we are here for a reason." Nothing like an unsolicited justification of the broadcasters' existence to really generate excitement. Then again, Nantz seems incapable of generating excitement no matter what the situation.

Mocking shallow TV guys is easy, but it's only when you see someone as uncomfortable, inarticulate and all-around inept as Nantz that you understand that, however much they irritate you, folks like Bob Costas, Greg Gumbel and -- God help me -- John Tesh are at least good at what they do. For the Olympics, where most viewers have only the vaguest notion of what's going on, a host who seems more confused than a Kenyan cross-country skier is a serious deficit. It didn't help Nantz and co-host Andrea Joyce that the Opening Ceremonies were astoundingly untelegenic. No wonder they sounded almost apologetic as they kept reminding us that the proceedings were meant to reflect "tradition" and "culture" -- classic television code words for "this is supposed to be dull." That doesn't excuse the CBS producers who insisted on packaging the sedate (by Atlanta standards) ceremony as if it were the hyperkinetic frenzy they so obviously wished it was. MTV-style jump cuts don't really work when the soundtrack is a 20-minute Beethoven piece.

Ironically, the Opening Ceremony's big concession to U.S. television only made matters worse. To air live during prime time on the East Coast, the show began on what for Japan was early-morning Saturday. Well, early-morning Saturday never has the same energy as Friday night, and you could forget about laser shows and fireworks or even the glittering lights of the city to liven things up. Instead you had guys erecting oversized telephone polls and nearly naked sumo wrestlers stomping around in circles.

That's Nagano's call, of course, and maybe it was more fun to view from the stands (though I wouldn't have wanted to pay $900 for it), but CBS could have been prepared with entertaining taped segments explaining what it was all about. As it turned out, the network did have such segments, they just chose to save them for the following day -- despite the fact that Nantz and Joyce floundered trying to kill over an hour on opening night when the skiing prelims they were going to kick off with were delayed by bad weather.

But forget all that. The important question is how the CBS team handles the actual sports coverage. Initial indications are not promising. Although the events are almost all taped and could easily be framed with brief explanations and tips on what to watch for (as TNT provides), what we get instead are the usual barrage of unhelpful sports clichés: "You can't count him out," "She's giving it her all" and so on. A computer simulation of the alpine skiing run looked great but was especially frustrating. Computer graphics could easily have been used to illustrate what the skiers needed to do on each section of the run, but CBS's announcers just gushed about how cool it all looked.

Something is very wrong when IBM commercials do a better job of explaining the games than the announcers do (just as something is wrong when a Web site ad greets you with a warning that "the Java implementation may cause your browser to crash"). Even snowboarding, a new Olympic event that's being much hyped, was shown without any discussion of what the sport is all about or how its different maneuvers are performed. Instead, the event's announcer dude (a snowboarder himself judging from his adept deployments of the word "awesome") kept repeating that one racer after another "loves to go fast." Do any Olympic competitors not love to go fast? Maybe they prefer to take their time, enjoy the scenery?

Once the athletes got to the bottom of the hill, who was standing there with a microphone but MTV has-been Kennedy! Perhaps dread about facing her explains why so many slalom racers wiped out halfway down the course on Monday night.

So far, CBS's Nagano ratings have been well short of those generated by Atlanta and Lillehammer. No doubt the CBS Sports brass is blaming the weather, which has wreaked havoc with the scheduling of some of the most popular events. The one guaranteed ratings draw, figure skating, has led to another problem. Not only is CBS slavishly covering every skating contest at the expense of less popular sports, but it has also been covering skating even when there are no contests: Hours are spent drooling over practice sessions, strategy meetings, even reruns of 1994 performances.

While it was neat to see Michelle Kwan fall on her butt during a run-through, what's the point if Scott Hamilton is still going to say that she was "just beautiful" and assure us that "these early practices really don't mean anything"? If that's true, why are we watching them?

All right, let's withhold final judgment: It has, after all, only been five days -- already, though, it feels like a month.
SALON | Feb. 12, 1998 

Daniel Radosh's last Media Circus piece was about Newsweek's Cyberscope section.