The Los Angeles 2028 Summer Olympics will be the operational equivalent of producing “200 Super Bowls in a month,” LA28 chairperson and president Casey Wasserman said Thursday. For NBC, televising it will be nearly as ambitious.
NBC is preparing an unprecedented amount of coverage for the Games, according to Molly Solomon, executive producer and president of programming for NBC Olympics and Paralympics, dramatically expanding its output from the last Summer Olympics held in the U.S. in Atlanta in 1996.
The staggering increase illustrates the challenge facing NBC and LA28 less than two years before the Games: staging and televising an enormously complicated global event while making it feel simple, emotional and entertaining for viewers. The two sides have spent years working together on everything from when marquee events take place to how NBC can quickly turn unfamiliar athletes into characters audiences care about.
“In 1996, we produced 171 hours on NBC — 171 total,” Solomon said during Puck and MoffettNathanson’s In the Arena conference in New York. “In 2028, we are going to program more than 100 each day on NBC and our cable networks.”
That doesn’t include Peacock offerings such as Gold Zone and individual event streams, she noted.
Wasserman offered another way to illustrate the scale, saying organizers expect roughly 1 million transportation trips per day as major competitions unfold simultaneously across Southern California.
“We’re the operational equivalent of seven Super Bowls a day for 30 days,” he said. “Go produce 200 Super Bowls in a month. Like the scale and the complexity, it requires a lot of planning. It requires a lot of logistics. It requires a lot of technical expertise.”
Wasserman has continued to lead LA28 amid controversy over emails he exchanged with Ghislaine Maxwell more than two decades ago that surfaced in the Epstein files earlier this year. The fallout led to his exit from his namesake talent and sports agency, which later rebranded as The Team, while LA28’s executive committee backed him remaining in his Olympics role.
For NBC, the challenge is getting audiences invested almost instantly in athletes they may rarely see outside the Olympics.
“We’ve got to make you care in 20 seconds or less,” Solomon said, adding that athlete profiles, announcers and new production technology will help give viewers context around competitors they may not know, making the Olympics feel as much like an entertainment show as a sports competition.
“You’re watching the most meaningful day of someone’s life every 20 minutes,” she further stated.
NBC’s influence also extends to when viewers will see those moments. The network and LA28 have been working together on the competition schedule since 2020, including efforts to keep marquee events from competing against one another.
“We got to solve for NBC first, because that is the most important thing, full stop, without exceptions,” Wasserman said.
NBC also sees LA28 as an opportunity to cultivate a new generation of Olympics fans, with Solomon pointing to Gen Z, Gen Alpha and even some millennials who missed out on years of the traditional Olympics experience during the pandemic.
For Wasserman, though, the enormous infrastructure behind the Games ultimately serves a much simpler purpose. “People get so wrapped up in all the other stuff and forget in the end what people like is the competition and the stories and the environments,” he said.
