NWK Book Club

The challenge of broadcasting the Olympics, while vastly more complicated in the Twitter age, is much the same as the one Ebersol confronted in Barcelona: making Americans care about a wide world of sports they barely follow. From kayaking to gymnastics, from volleyball to wrestling, even the most luminous stars are largely unknown to all but the aficionados. To this day, NBC’s answer to this problem remains the model that Ebersol pioneered: an elaborately constructed tableau based on drawing in viewers, especially female viewers, through the age-old power of storytelling.