• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, August 6, 2024

It has been great to see the viewership reports emanating from NBC for the Summer Olympics.

The latest was the report posted Monday on MediaPost. The headline: “Paris Games First 9 Days: 32.6 Million Viewers, 77% Over Tokyo’s”.

As a reminder, the Tokyo Summer Olympics were delayed a year when the COVID-19 epidemic broke out in 2020. The games were held a year later in July 2021.

So why the increased interest in the Games this summer? A couple of things in no real order.

As a TV blogger whose daily output depends at least in part on the more or less constant arrival of new TV shows worth writing about, I can tell you that this summer has been one of the fallowest in memory.

In fact, August -- always a fallow month -- is starting out like a new-content desert in which a TV columnist crawls through arid sands and sees only mirages, like in a New Yorker cartoon.

The agony of the TV scribe aside, the Olympics come along at a time when (hyperbole alert) nothing or next-to-nothing is on TV -- whether network, cable or streaming.

The caveat is that certainly a handful of new shows have come this summer.

But it seems to me that the frenzy for constantly stuffing the new-content pipeline that has long been the strategy adopted by all the major streamers has slowed.

This is not to position the Olympics as some sort of last resort for viewers seeking something fresh to watch this summer.

Far from it. And this is the other reason why the Olympics are catching on. NBC’s coverage has been amazing.

It is another example of how sports programming of all kinds -- live or otherwise -- represents the best in state-of-the-art television.

The technical wizardry this summer has been outstanding. It is video Velcro.

Thus, it is not just the paucity of other compelling content to watch in these dog days. But the scheduling of the Summer Olympics in the heart of summer cannot hurt either.

NBC has benefited from star athletes whose stories are compelling for U.S. audiences -- the U.S. women's gymnastics team led by Simone Biles, the U.S. men's gymnastics team, swimmer Katie Ledecky, sprinter Noah Lyles (seen in the screenshot above, sixth from the left) and many others.

Lastly, the Summer Olympics with its many U.S. success stories come as a welcome respite to everything else going on around us, particularly when many of us sometimes get the feeling that the U.S.A.'s best days are behind us.

Not so, say the Olympics.