Last year’s Summer Olympics were kind of a mess, partly because of NBC’s bizarre approach to coverage. Rather than simply showing events in a straightforward way that makes them easy to watch, the network chopped them up into bite-sized chunks that made room for as many ads as possible, and it added excessive time-delays that pushed the broadcast of some events late into the night.
For 2018’s Winter Games in South Korea, though, NBC is just going to say “fuck it” and air its primetime coverage live across all time zones. This will be the first time it has ever done that for the Winter Olympics, and it comes just after the network also decided to do the same thing for the final few episodes of this season of Saturday Night Live. According to Deadline, NBC’s primetime Olympics coverage will be followed by local news and then a post-primetime block of continuing Olympics coverage. After that it will re-air the primetime stuff, so people in the Pacific Time Zone might get stuck with some stuff they’ve already seen if they’re watching NBC into the early evening, while people in New York and Chicago can comfortably go to bed a little early without missing any important events.
These games will also be NBC’s first with Mike Tirico stepping in for Bob Costas, so if it’s bad again, everybody can blame him and the new schedule. Coverage of the games begins on February 8, 2018.