Torino TV Ratings

Meanwhile, the Winter Olympics TV ratings. . . .

NBC has slowly been improving its Nielsen numbers over the past few days in airing these Games, and Dick Ebersol (the NBC Sports head honcho, you'll recall) must have thought this past Thursday night would be a shoo-in for the network, what with ladies' figure skating and all. Too bad Fox aired a Thursday night edition of "American Idol" in the eight o'clock (Eastern Time) hour -and despite the fact that NBC showed some of the ladies's figure skating long program then, Fox's no-talent contest creamed the peacock network. Fox followed it up at nine with their utterly ridiculous "Skating With Celebrities" - basically, "Dancing With the Stars" on ice - which must have done rather well against a hour of skiing on NBC. (Unlike the Winter Olympics, the results of Fox's "competitions" were not known in advance.) The bulk of the ladies' figure skating event was shown at around eleven - more than an hour after Fox signed off for the night - but, of course, almost everyone knew Sasha Cohen lost by then, so who cared?

There's little NBC can do about tape delays and instantaneous results from half a world away. But it had best figure out what exactly what little can be done in advance of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, where the time difference will be even greater. An inability to cope with time differences is part (though, admittedly, not all) of the reason ABC hasn't broadcast a winter or summer Olympiad in nearly two decades.