2004 Athens
Summer Olympics
Too Hot for US TV
January 27, 2005
What can make nine complaints to the FCC noteworthy? A response. No one
really noticed that a few days before Christmas, the FCC had published the nine
complaints on its website that it received against NBC’s Olympics Coverage for
indecency. It wouldn’t have been easy for someone to have found these
complaints on the FCC’s website. (As a former telecom lawyer, I even had
problems finding it, and I had been on that site hundreds of times in the past
few years.) But when Gianna Angelopoulos-Daskalaki, the president of the Athens
2004 Organizing Committee, had her commentary published in last Sunday’s Los
Angeles Times it wouldn’t be long until the casual observer was reminded that
the FCC had started an investigation into the indecency of NBC’s Olympics
telecast. As ridiculous as these complaints are when you read them, Daskalaki’s
response only adds to the ridiculousness of the situation.
Only two of the nine complaints offered anything actionable or remotely
worthy of a fine for NBC. Both mentioned that someone dropped the F-bomb during
a volleyball match. A six second tape delay, giving the producers enough time to
either bleep out or mute the word, would have been wise and completely
appropriate, given that there was no semblance or illusion that even the live
sports were being shown live. One of the complaints states that the same word
was heard during the Opening Ceremonies. Impossible. Unless it was coming from
Katie Couric or Bob Costas, both of whom I would consider incapable of using
that word, there was no way anyone could have heard it because you couldn’t
hear anything due to the poor audio mixing. What more likely happened was that
someone who was watching the Opening Ceremonies with the person who filed the
complaint, exclaimed, “What the f---?” at the sight of the glowing stomach
of the pregnant woman, and that’s the profanity they heard. If the FCC really
wanted to go after profanity, they should have hired a Greek speaker to
translate the coach’s tirade during one of the timeouts of the USA-Greece men’s
volleyball semifinal.
The remainder of the complaints centered on the Opening Ceremonies. One
complaint read that there was an exposed breast during the Opening Ceremony.
After all the fuss over last year’s Super Bowl halftime show, the American
viewer’s radar would have been so sensitive to something like that would have
had people calling their friends and rewinding it on their DVRs to the point
where everyone would have been talking about it on Monday morning. The other
complaints about the Opening Ceremonies were about the young lovers running
around in the water, which was pretty tame compared to the TV-14 version they
showed on Greek television. The final complaint was about the anatomically
correct male statue that emerged from the large marble slab. This was about as
obscene as a trip to a museum.
The lunacy of these complaints simply didn’t warrant any official Greek
response, much less the one that Daskalaki sent into the LA Times. Her stated
reason for writing this letter was that if NBC was punished for airing the
opening ceremonies, which in her opinion “in reality depicted Greek
contributions to civilization — it would, in effect, label a presentation of
our [Greek] culture on your [American] airwaves as ‘indecent.’” If she
just mentioned the complaint about the male statue, this letter may have been
okay. Daskalaki correctly explained, “we represented the Greek sculpture
people see in museums, realistic human beings as God made them.” She advised
the FCC not “punish NBC or Greece for accurately portraying Greek culture in
your living rooms.” While I agree with that concept in theory, in reality, the
things that she mentioned are as loosely connected to Greek culture as the
Windex in MBFGW. Daskalaki tried to defend the showing of “a couple enjoying
their love of the Greek sea and each other” and “the history of Eros, the
god of love,” adding that, “turning love, yearning and desire into a deity
is an important part of our contribution to civilization.” All I saw was a
gratuitous escapade thrown in by the producers of the Opening Ceremonies to
break up the intellectuality of it all. And as for creating Eros, if we have the
Greeks to thank for creating something for the Romans to copy in the form of
Cupid, ultimately leading to the commercialization of love through candy hearts,
flowers, and cards, I’m not sure if she should be spending too much effort in
equating that with Greek contributions in science, math, government and the
arts.
Despite all of this attention, it is doubtful that anything will come of
these complaints, particularly with FCC Chairman Michael Powell’s surprise
resignation last week and all the focus on the planned commercials for the
upcoming Super Bowl and measures taken by the Fox Network, and others to
sanitize their current line up of shows. Even if it does, Greeks would be better
served not to add any legitimacy to these complaints by discussing them further
in any sort of official capacity.
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