For Jones, let the Twitter Games begin
Looks like Leslie Jones couldn’t quit Twitter now. She just got a new gig as the official “tweeter” for NBC, which is the official network covering the Olympics in Rio, Brazil.
Jones, who famously quit Twitter (for about a minute) after being on the receiving end of some racial tweets, got the gig for her hilarious Olympic tweets.
In her tweets, Jones shares a brief video of a key moment of the different Olympic sports, along with a brief commentary. Like when she shared videos of Angola and Montenegro playing handball. In a series of tweets, Jones said: “Please someone wtf? ...I mean the ball is so small without a bat or a hockey stick. What is happening? I’m confused.”
Or when two divers were onscreen in the trunks, Jones simply tweeted: “Hmmmm.”
Jones herself tweeted about going to Rio. She shared a photo of herself wearing an official NBC Rio 2016 hat with the tweet: “RIO BOUND BABY. USA! USA!”
Mike Shoemaker, producer of Late Night with Seth Meyers, was the first to suggest that NBC hire Jones with a tweet to his NBC friends: “Get
(Jones) to Rio and give her a microphone. 30% more USA gold + ratings.”
This wasn’t the first time Jones got a gig because of her impassioned tweets. She also guested on Late Night to watch the finale of Game of Thrones last June. The result was loud but funny commentaries on how some deaths unfolded.
Late Night also airs on NBC, which has been battling controversy and ratings issues during its first day of airing because of too many advertisements aired during Olympics airing, which meant social media was more updated because of the delay.
But thanks to Katie Ledecky, Michael Phelps and the American women’s gymnastics team, Sunday was a bounceback night for NBC in ratings for the Rio de Janeiro Olympics.
NBC’s prime-time telecast averaged 29.8 million viewers Sunday, higher than Friday’s opening ceremony and nine million more than Saturday’s lackluster first night of competition. The stars aligned for NBC on Sunday, with Phelps and Ledecky in gold medal-winning swims that were aired live, and a dominating performance by the gymnasts.
It was still below the 36 million viewers NBC had for the corresponding Sunday at the 2012 London Games. However, Olympic fare was also shown on NBCSN and Bravo in prime-time this year. Adding those viewers to NBC’s total brings it to 34 million watching the Olympics on Sunday evening. There were no such competing networks in 2012, and NBC also didn’t stream its broadcast online, as it does now.
Bravo’s viewership peaked at 1.7 million with the doubles match upset of Venus and Serena Williams, the Nielsen company said.
Meanwhile, NBC gymnastics announcer Al Trautwig said Monday he regretted saying on Twitter that the adoptive parents of US gymnast Simone Biles were not her parents. Biles was adopted as a toddler by her maternal grandfather and his wife after she was placed in foster care. Advocates for adoption had objected to the characterization, and NBC ordered Trautwig to delete the offending tweet.