How Reality TV Ruined the Olympics: A Diatribe

Perhaps if I were more of a glass half-full kind of person or just had a better appreciation for cause and effect, I would have titled this post "How the Olympics Inspired Reality TV" as they predated the creation of the loosely scripted show by, give or take, several hundred years (with the exception, of course, of Real World which, if I recall correctly, included Socrates, Aristotle, and Herodotus in its very first cast and broke through boundaries when the latter's "Girlfriend Back Home" was actually revealed to be Plato). However, I can no longer remain silent on how The Bachelor and its ilk have forced NBC's hand, causing them to escalate what were already borderline exploitative tactics and play a very dangerous game for anyone who has not undergone the soul de-juvenation therapy willingly partaken of by anyone who hosts reality TV.

The Olympics have always toyed with audiences' emotions. We care too little about the storied history of Norwegian warfare that led to their dominance in biathlon and remain to staunch in our refusal to invest the energy  necessary to understand the stleties of ski jump scoring. So instead, they draw us in with tales of adversity conquered, with personal tragedy that belies a much greater strength than that required to battle g-forces on a precariously balanced sled. They do everything in their power to transform our confusion and boredom with these sports; to overcome our patriotism lest our country loses; and to make sure that, by the time every other country's swimmer false starts, leaving only a floundering Kenyan doggie paddling in the pool, we're not just rooting for him. We're doing it with tears in our eyes.

And for a long time, that was enough. The Olympics fed us a steady, balanced diet of human excellence and schmaltz and we gleefully lapped it up. But somewhere along the lines, reality TV ruined all that. By upsetting the balance of our measured, every four years dosage, and feeding us a constant stream of aspiring chefs, of 24-year-old spinsters on desperate, last-ditch quests for love, of people somehow making a career out of hunting for bigfoot all overcoming tragedy and peril, reality TV has lessened our ability to appreciate what once made Olympians truly great.

All this would have been fine if the NBC Olympics squad had responded like any other sports program scrambling for ratings, if they had run the athletes through a gauntlet of good works; if they had promised cheap trinkets to the first 10,000 viewers (can you imagine the price a rare "Bob Costas with Pink Eye" bobblehead would fetch on e-bay?); if they had trotted out t-shirt cannons or skantily clad dancers or a halftime show wardrobe malfunction (if it appears that I'm just asking that the Olympics feature more nudity, well...weirdly, that's exactly what I'm doing).

Sadly, instead of relying on any of these time honored tropes, the Olympics crew seems to be taking its cues, not from the Super Bowl or even the NHL (and oh, how we all long for the re-emergence of the rainbow puck tail), but instead from the self-same hardship-mongerers that got them into this mess in the first place. They took their cures from reality TV and upped the tragedy ante.

It would be one thing if the Olympics just milked their athletes' 15 days of fame to develop questionable reality vehicles, but I'm actually not even talking about that (mostly because my brain refuses to compute the fact that What Would Ryan Lochte Do? even existed, largely as a coping mechanism). It's entirely another that, instead of bringing in the Barbara Walters filter and telling us that delightful pink-haired skeleton...doer (Not sure what the proper term is, here. Skeleton Rider? Slider? Skeletor?) Katie Uhlaender's father recently passed away, they've decided to aggressively ask her about how he would feel about her finishing just out of the medals. Instead of setting up Bode Miller's redemption by telling us about his brother whose untimely death casts a shadow over the Olympics they were supposed to share, they repeatedly hit Bode over the head with that fact until he collapsed, not from physical exhaustion but in sideline-reporter-wrought devastation. The fact that our heart strings have been inoculated against being pulled by a simple background package does not justify the deployment of these tragedies as if they are weapons against boredom and happiness, as if those two are one and the same. It's despicable and it's disgusting. And I think it's safe to say that Chris Harrison is to blame.