Bob Costas is switching teams — er, networks. The sportscaster will leave HBO Sports to join the MLB Network, Variety reports.
At his new cable home, Costas will provide ...
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Thought you had heard the last of the Olympics until 2010? Think again.
On Saturday, Dec. 27, NBC will broadcast Beijing Olympics Opening Ceremony: TV Event of the Year, a two-hour special hosted by Bob Costas and Matt Lauer, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
In addition to reliving the breathtaking production that kicked off the games, the special will ...
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Anyone else going through Olympics withdrawal? Mine started around the time the Olympic flame was extinguished during Sunday night’s broadcast of the closing ceremonies. I felt a sense of deflation as I watched replays of many of the games’ most thrilling moments. Also a sense of loss, even as I was being dazzled one more time by the pyrotechnics (presumably real) of the final spectacular, with a return of the drummers and gravity-defying performers amid a reprise, albeit on a somewhat smaller scale, of the human light show from the opening ceremonies, with shimmering movement and color holding us spellbound. (At least until the British showed up, with their tacky-by-comparison half-time-lite show. It’s going to be hard for anyone to measure up to China’s showmanship.)How am I going to fill my days and especially my nights now that I no longer have Bob Costas as my professional escort? What a great job he did as host and interviewer, always keeping his cool, even...
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The other night, NBC ran a cute piece toward the end of its prime-time broadcast—which means it probably aired somewhere around midnight—about how people are battling sleep deprivation thanks to how late we’re all staying up to watch the Olympics each night. Somehow I was awake to watch it—although someone in the office told me they saw the piece repurposed at another time, so who knows when I saw it; it’s all a blur.The point being that when big Olympics events are live, as they were the first week of the games with Michael Phelps’ awesome miniseries-like laps of swimming history and the team gymnastics competitions, there’s an undeniable thrill watching them unfold in real time, no matter how late it goes. (I groaned one night last week upon realizing the women’s gymnastics weren’t starting until 11:10 pm/ET, but I stayed glued until well past 1 in the morning. No regrets.)But this week it’s a different story, and it boils down to ...
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One World. One Dream. One astonishing opening-night show. Friday’s spectacular curtain-raising opening ceremonies for the Beijing Olympics more than lived up to the hype, and NBC gave us a stunning bird’s-eye view of all of the razzle-dazzle inside the so-called “bird’s nest” of the gargantuan Olympic soccer stadium.Feeling at times as if it were the greatest Vegas or half-time show in history, everything was scaled to overwhelm, from the fireworks that lit up the sky like a month’s worth of 4ths of July, to the scrim that ringed the top of the stadium with evocative cinematic montages, to the thousands of drummers and dancers and performers wowing the crowd, many of them lit up in garish colors like fanciful beacons of joy.To emphasize the fact that this display of cultural pride was being beamed to a global audience, a highlight of the extravaganza involved a giant globe rising from the floor, with dancers skimming around the surface suspended by wire...
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