NBC's Olympics plans have heart monitors, Snoop Dogg, a strong hint of desperation

The Olympics are almost upon us once again—that hallowed event where humanity comes together, once every two years, to ask itself the big, important questions that define us as a species. What is the pinnacle of human athletic achievement? How do some of these people swim so fast, and why? And, of course, the most important question of all: Why the fuck can’t NBC make any money off of the Olympics any more?

That’s certainly the question the network is asking itself this year, if a recent Variety profile of the company’s upcoming Olympics programming is any indication. The fact is that NBC—currently about halfway through a $12 billion deal to broadcast the Games in the U.S. through 2032—has had a run of what televisual sports enthusiasts call “real stinkers” over the last few years, with COVID, criticism of Chinese humans rights abuses, and basic practicalities like inconvenient time zones cutting into viewership for the last three Games. The result is apparently a broadcasting schedule that TV execs would probably describe as “boldly innovative,” because it’s rude to say “flop-sweat-stank desperate” in circumstances like this.

Some of this stuff is fairly obvious—hiring Snoop Dogg to run around the 2024 Paris games as the network’s man on the street, for instance. (Or, in the words of NBC Olympics executive producer Molly Solomon, “He really wants to be Snoop on the loose and to follow the Dogg, double­-G.” Real quote, a human being sincerely said that.) But it also involves stuff like hooking the parents of some of the athletes up to heart monitors while their kids compete, so everyone can see how tense they get, a move that “test audiences have loved.” (Why stop there, we ask? How does having a kid competing in the Olympics affect the regularity and consistency of a parents’ bowel movements? The test audiences want to know!)

On a more practical, less Fear Factor-y note, NBC is also doubling down on its Peacock support of the games, making the move this year to real-time streams of every event on the online platform. That, we’ll concede, is a genuinely bold move—especially since it’ll be cutting into whatever heat the network is trying to build when it broadcasts highlights of the Games during primetime. Hence the more sideshow-y elements and a bigger focus on celebrities, apparently, instead of all that distracting, boring sports.

The Olympics kick off with the opening ceremony in Paris on July 26.