After seeing a massive chunk of its billion-dollar investment in the Tokyo Olympics wiped out by a global pandemic, NBCUniversal were lucky to recoup a programming breakout in Olympic Highlights. The 30ish-minute late-night streaming-only show is more than mere alloy of ESPN’s SportsCenter and SNL’s Weekend Update. During that quadrennial it had Kevin Hart and Snoop Dogg serving up their irreverent takes on the Games’ great and not-so-great moments uncensored and off the cuff; dressage hasn’t looked the same since Snoop likened it to crip walking. “This horse is off the chain,” Snoop cheered, grooving along while flashing westside hand gestures. “I gotta get this motherfucker in a video!”
Recorded out of Hart’s Laugh Out Loud studios in Los Angeles as part of the company’s multi-year production deal with NBCU, the show resonated most on social media – which figures, given that’s where onlookers ultimately wound up gathering. Snoop, who collected some anchoring experience presenting the wildly offbeat Double G News satire, proved such a highlight on his own that NBC invited him into their tent this time to breathe in the scene and relate his impersonations on live TV. (All the while, France’s strict laws against marijuana promise to keep the joint-sparking rap star “clean as a book, clean as the athletes”, he told Time. “They can test me if they want to.”) Across the board, ratings have been through the roof.
In Paris, Snoop has further emerged as America’s leading dignitary, carrying the actual Olympic torch in addition to the symbolic one for hip-hop – which, between Queen Latifah showing love to USA men’s basketball, Flavor Flav hyping up women’s water polo, Tom Cruise (AKA the notorious Les Grossman) showing up for gymnastics and breaking’s premiere on the Olympics program – has never been so well represented at the Games. When Snoop wasn’t watching tennis with court queen Billie Jean King or swimming with Michael Phelps, he was distributing his own Olympic pin – a puff-pass-inspired design that, given the setting, couldn’t be more blunt.
That’s a big character to replace for any show, much less one on a second-rate streamer like Peacock. Much of what made Highlights so compelling was the contrast between Snoop’s tranquil gangster energy with Hart’s explosive Napoleon complex. In an outtake from last season, Hart upbraids the show crew, then blames the tough talk on his proximity to Snoop. “Something about being next to you makes me feel good,” Hart tells him, drawing laughs from the audience-less studio.
You’d think his next call would’ve been to 50 Cent or Samuel L Jackson, someone who could keep that same energy. In the end Hart went with Kenan Thompson, SNL’s goofy elder statesman and former collaborator on a series of New Year’s Eve specials for Peacock. The results so far have been comedy gold.
Thompson on sports is nothing new. Some of his best SNL work rely on his half-assed impressions of basketball legend Charles Barkley and baseball hero David Ortiz – and then of course he made his show business debut 30 years ago in the Mighty Ducks. His singular American perspective on French cultural affairs is another persistent career theme.
For the Olympic Highlights poster, Thompson reprises the SNL character Jean K Jean – the French Def Jam comedian and Update desk guest who tags punchlines by screaming “zut alors!” in between outright bashing the Belgians; it’s an oddly specific Venn diagram where I, a lycée-schooled Chicagoan obsessed with Chris Rock and Bernie Mac, happened to be living at the time. “It’s so cold up in Marseille, brothers aren’t wearing berets. They’re wearing brrrrrets!” On the Nickelodeon series All That – SNL for kids, essentially – Thompson was getting laughs as a teen with Pierre Escargot, a “semi-educational” bubble-bathing bon vivant known for translating daft lines like “your balloons smell like a fine rump roast” in the worst French imaginable.
Since then, Thompson has made considerable strides with his pronunciation and his comedy has matured – but he hasn’t lost any of the childlike zaniness that makes him so thoroughly likable still. On the season two debut of Olympics Highlights, which launched on Peacock last Friday, Thompson introduced a segment on French facts with joke about R&B crooner Trey Songz – “or as he’s known in known in France, ‘Very Songs’”. Video of French swimmer Clement Secchi practicing butterfly strokes against a raging wave pool prompted more silly bites. (“Why am I craving salmon all of a sudden …”)
In episode two, released on Monday, the hosts reacted to the opening ceremony – which, among other French twists, featured a set piece that paid homage to the ménage à trois. While Hart played the part of the confused American home viewer (“I’m gonna say what everyone is thinking: what the fuck is going on, man?”), Thompson didn’t miss a beat: “That’s France,” he deadpanned. “They about to do the Eiffel Tower.”
After hours of blinkered, orgiastic and outright jingoistic coverage of the games on American TV, Olympics Highlights hits like a hot tub plunge after a high-score dive. It’s searing, it’s soothing – it’s perfect relief. The main event could learn a lot from this sideshow.
