Dancing With The Olympic Stars on Exile Island?
Perhaps I'm asking too much here. (But I'm a dreamer, deal with it.) Does everything I like have to be on the tube at the same time? It just strikes me as odd that all of the really interesting events on television happen on the same nights, at the same time.
Witness last Thursday night's clash of the titans. NBC had the Olympic Gold on the line in the much ballyhooed face-off between the best female skaters in the world while over on ABC they were "Dancing With The Stars" in the final dance before Sunday's final episode, and on CBS we had the latest batch of Type A personalities (& tv wannabees) was making alliances and plucking snails off the rocks on "Survivor; Exile Island. " What was America watching? American Idol's first round of popular vote losers! That's correct, and it wasn't even close--- it was a ratings landslide!
Which brings up another and more salient point.
We as a nation, choose to watch our fellow countrymen (and women) get their hearts ripped out and dreams destroyed on national television rather than root our best athletes on to victory.
Perhaps the choice had already been made for us. Most of the other networks and internet providers were in hyperdrive to ruin NBC's ratings with "breaking news" crawls and Olympic updates. I sense something else is at work here. Something bigger than mere competition between media outlets. Boredom.
Just as we said good-bye to outdated sports like Barrel Jumping (yes, we actually had a sport where men were crowned champion of the world because they were able to skate real fast and jump over a bunch of whiskey/wine barrels lined up on the ice), perhaps it's time to move the "Modern" Olympics off to a new territory. Or maybe we just need to let them morph into what people really want to see.
Olympic Idol...
Countries send their best 10,000 or so hopefuls... Randy, Simon, & Paula whittle it down to what they see as the best and then the world gets to vote (don't we all have global long distance by now?).
It's an idea whose time has come. Now, how do I make money off of it? I'll think about that right after barrel-jumping practice. Everything old is new, no?
Witness last Thursday night's clash of the titans. NBC had the Olympic Gold on the line in the much ballyhooed face-off between the best female skaters in the world while over on ABC they were "Dancing With The Stars" in the final dance before Sunday's final episode, and on CBS we had the latest batch of Type A personalities (& tv wannabees) was making alliances and plucking snails off the rocks on "Survivor; Exile Island. " What was America watching? American Idol's first round of popular vote losers! That's correct, and it wasn't even close--- it was a ratings landslide!
Which brings up another and more salient point.
We as a nation, choose to watch our fellow countrymen (and women) get their hearts ripped out and dreams destroyed on national television rather than root our best athletes on to victory.
Perhaps the choice had already been made for us. Most of the other networks and internet providers were in hyperdrive to ruin NBC's ratings with "breaking news" crawls and Olympic updates. I sense something else is at work here. Something bigger than mere competition between media outlets. Boredom.
Just as we said good-bye to outdated sports like Barrel Jumping (yes, we actually had a sport where men were crowned champion of the world because they were able to skate real fast and jump over a bunch of whiskey/wine barrels lined up on the ice), perhaps it's time to move the "Modern" Olympics off to a new territory. Or maybe we just need to let them morph into what people really want to see.
Olympic Idol...
Countries send their best 10,000 or so hopefuls... Randy, Simon, & Paula whittle it down to what they see as the best and then the world gets to vote (don't we all have global long distance by now?).
It's an idea whose time has come. Now, how do I make money off of it? I'll think about that right after barrel-jumping practice. Everything old is new, no?
posted by Stuntbrain at 4:12 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home