The mastermind behind NBC’s Olympic transformation: ‘She is a visionary’
The bill NBC pays for the Olympics is measured in billions, so when NBC’s president and executive producer for the Olympics, Molly Solomon, called her boss to tell her she wanted to add Snoop Dogg as a featured personality to its prime-time coverage before the Paris Games, NBCUniversal Media Group then-chairman Mark Lazarus, raised an eyebrow. He wasn’t alone.
“I had to really convince them that we had to take some swings,” Solomon told The Athletic, before showing off a little of her trademark personality and putting her plan in perspective. “It wasn’t Snoop calling swimming.”
Solomon was reimagining the Olympics’ viewing experience. From executive producers Roone Arledge to Dick Ebersol to Jim Bell, there was a pre-digital age formula to the Olympics on TV that was, well, gold: Human interest stories packaged perfectly for prime time, even if that meant showing the actual competition on tape delay or “plausibly live” as the euphemism went.
However, NBC’s billion-dollar investment had been shattered by COVID-19 postponements, inconvenient locations and the ever-changing media landscape. Ultimately, big-time TV is a scoreboard business.
“The ratings demanded a change,” Solomon said.
The 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics averaged 11.4 million TV and streaming viewers in primetime, a 42 percent decline from the 19.8 million viewers during the 2018 Games in Pyeongchang.
What transpired in Paris during the summer of 2024 was one of the greatest transformations of the TV presentation of the Olympic Games. Under Solomon’s leadership, NBC reimagined the event, prioritizing the live experience on its relatively new streaming service (Peacock), network TV or cable outlets and then using primetime to tell a fuller, packaged story on broadcast TV.
She wrestled back the immediacy of the competition by day, then by night pulled it all together into the drama — the context with a bit of gloss, for a Netflix-like binge for tens of millions over a little more than two weeks.
For the forthcoming Olympics in Milan Cortina, Snoop is back, while Stanley Tucci will give a taste of Italy. The NFL Red Zone-like “Gold Zone” will return, whipping around on Peacock for the crucial moments as they happen. It’s a new Olympic formula, and it is the brainchild of Solomon.
Solomon’s accomplishments are still being burnished, but with the reimagining for the digital age of the Paris Olympics, she is now more than a caretaker of the Games, just working off Arledge’s and Ebersol’s old notes.
Sports TV production leadership has historically been dominated by men, but Solomon is about to stand next to her mentor, Ebersol, and his mentor, Arledge, on the medal stand. She has already become the most successful female sports TV executive of all-time.
“The reason that I’m here is because of Ebersol,” Solomon said.
In 1990, Solomon graduated magna cum laude from Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service with a Bachelor of Science in international politics. Solomon once had visions of being a sports reporter and interned with The Washington Post.
She turned to TV, where she had the springboard position of being a researcher for legendary NBC Olympic host Bob Costas. Others to work as Costas’s right-hand include former NBCUniversal Television CEO Jeff Zucker, current NBC Sports executive producer Sam Flood and — for Costas’ first prime-time hosting spot from Barcelona in 1992 — Solomon. Ebersol noticed her quickly and her NBC Sports career took off.
“He put me in meetings before I was supposed to be in them,” Solomon said.
By the time she was 32 at the Sydney Olympics in 2000, when Ebersol would rest his eyes, Solomon was in the big chair making the decisions overnight. In 2010, at the Vancouver Olympics, she produced the programming for figure skating.
“He always kept pushing me out of the nest to do hard things,” Solomon said.
By 2012, she was named executive producer of Golf Channel, becoming the first woman to hold the position at a national sports network. Seven years later, she was named the leader of NBC’s Olympic coverage. A great honor, but 2019 was not the best timing.
The pandemic postponed the 2020 Games, and the locations in Tokyo and Beijing for Solomon’s first two Olympics were not convenient time zones for U.S. TV viewers. Plus, in a social media age, instantaneous results are captured the moment after they happen, spoiling the typical primetime drama for many fans.
Solomon’s style is not to sulk but rather to look ahead and figure out what is next. She leads with a different type of energy than most television executives.
“I’ve never felt more joy from someone who is the president and executive producer,” NBC’s Olympic late-night host Maria Taylor said. “She just illuminates joy. It’s a little like working with the Energizer Bunny.
“She is a visionary. Some of the things she infuses into the Olympics, if you went back eight years ago and said, ‘Let’s have Snoop at the Olympics and see what happens.’ She has a vision that is outside the box.”
NBCUniversal has the Olympics through 2036, having recently signed an extension that valued the 2034 and 2036 Games at a combined total of $3 billion. It is a vital part of the company’s overall business. It wants to use the Games to grow Peacock —its subscription streaming service — while making sure prime time on NBC still is lucrative.
To paraphrase Snoop, NBCUniversal had its mind on its money and its money on its mind when it comes to the Olympics.
When Solomon flipped the script in Paris, her bosses, beginning with NBC Sports president Rick Cordella, were counting on her. She took risks. They were visionary and needed.
“She had the fortitude to say, ‘We needed to do this,’” said colleague Fred Gaudelli, who is in the Pro Football Hall of Fame for his producing prowess. “It was time to make a change. If we keep going down the same path, we are probably not going to gain audience. We’re probably going to lose audience. That’s a hard thing to do. That takes a ton of guts.”