There is a scene in virtually every circus movie ever made — and Hollywood has made quite a few of them — where the rain comes down, the crowd starts to thin, and the clowns keep performing anyway. Something about the absurdity of carrying on while everything around you is dissolving feels deeply familiar to anyone working in the television business these days.

Which is why the conversation we have been having today with colleagues about the just-completed Winter Olympic Games deserves more than the usual hand-wringing about ratings trends and the future of linear television. It deserves some honest reckoning.

The question before us is a simple one: Is the Olympics the most important franchise in all of network television?

The answer, for NBC and its corporate parent Comcast, is almost certainly yes.

The twin Olympic flames were just extinguished yesterday in Milan-Cortina during a closing ceremony that played more like a long performance by the Blue Man Group after downing some magic mushrooms. And before anyone has had time to properly digest the spectacle of the U.S. men’s hockey team ending a 46-year gold medal drought with a dramatic overtime victory over Canada in the final, the numbers tell a story that NBC and all its affiliates have every right to feel great about.

Through the 17 days of competition, the network averaged 24 million viewers across its platforms — a 94% improvement over the 2022 Beijing Winter Games. Coverage topped 20 million viewers for 13 consecutive days. Thirteen. In a media landscape where a primetime drama drawing eight million viewers is considered a smashing success, that number deserves to be repeated out loud. And Peacock, the streaming platform that Comcast has been willing into relevance since its 2020 launch, recorded 14.8 billion minutes of streaming during these Games alone — more than double the total for all prior Winter Olympics combined.

The Opening Ceremony from Milan drew 21.4 million viewers, up 34% from Beijing. Which is to say that even the preamble — the parade of athletes, the fireworks, Mariah Carey performing an Italian ballad, and the crowd at San Siro openly booing the arrival of Vice President JD Vance — drew more viewers than most of what passes for a hit on network television in any given week.

This is what a franchise looks like.

Consider what happened in Paris just eighteen months ago. The 2024 Summer Games drew a combined average of 30.6 million viewers across NBCU’s platforms — an 82% jump over the pandemic-marred Tokyo Games and the highest figure for the Olympics since 2012. The 17-day event generated 180 billion minutes of total viewing time. NBC was the number one primetime broadcast network for 17 consecutive nights. Not a single night slipped. Not one. NBC’s Gary Zenkel, the network’s Olympics president, said after Paris that “the Olympics reestablished its unique power to reassemble the American media audience.” That is a sentence worth sitting with for a moment. “Reassemble.” As though the audience has been scattered — which, of course, it has — and the Olympics is the only bugle call that can bring it back together.

NBC Sports President Rick Cordella, speaking from Milan as the Games wound down, connected the dots plainly: “Paris begets Milan, and Milan will beget LA.”

He’s not wrong. But “begets” undersells it considerably.

What the Olympics delivers that no other property on network television can replicate — not the NFL, not the Oscars, not a presidential debate, not the finale of whatever prestige drama everyone is pretending to have watched — is genuine, unscripted, multinational, multiplatform appointment viewing. It is the one moment every two years when a deeply divided, perpetually distracted nation simultaneously agrees to watch the same thing. At the same time. And care about it.

Milan-Cortina gave us Mikaela Shiffrin’s gold medal in the slalom, which drew 20.2 million viewers on the day it aired. It gave us Alysa Liu’s gold in figure skating, part of a night that averaged 26.7 million viewers. It gave us Jack Hughes and Connor Hellebuyck ending four and a half decades of American men’s hockey futility in overtime against Canada on the final Sunday of the Games. And it gave us the curiously compelling U.S.-Sweden men’s hockey quarterfinal — a game that averaged 6.9 million viewers, making it the most-watched Olympic men’s hockey game since the gold medal contest at the 2010 Vancouver Games.

Which brings us back to the magic trick the Olympics pulls off that no other programming property can. It makes Americans care about sports they would never otherwise watch. Curling. Luge doubles. Freestyle ski halfpipe. Biathlon. At some point during every Games, tens of millions of people find themselves emotionally invested in a competition they couldn’t have explained the rules of a week earlier. That is not a programming strategy. That is something closer to alchemy. And in the current media landscape, alchemy is in very short supply.

Now, before we declare the gold medal awarded and play the anthem, let’s acknowledge the counterargument. The NFL is a formidable case. The Super Bowl draws north of 120 million viewers for a single game, occupies all four broadcast networks across the fall and winter, and generates enough advertising revenue to make every other programming category feel like a church bake sale by comparison.

If the Olympics is the tent, the NFL is the entire fairgrounds.

But here is the distinction that matters. The NFL is a year-round enterprise — 272 regular-season games, playoff rounds, a draft that somehow draws cable ratings, and an off-season news cycle that never actually goes off. The Olympics arrive every two years as a discrete, self-contained spectacle that has to earn its audience back from scratch each time. The fact that it consistently does so, and increasingly does so across streaming platforms that have otherwise struggled to aggregate mass audiences, is nothing short of remarkable.

There is also the matter of what the Olympics does for everything adjacent to it. The halo, as NBCU chairman Mark Lazarus correctly observed after Paris, extended to every corner of the business. NBC News ratings rise. The Today show posts its best numbers in years. (Though we reluctantly have to acknowledge that the real-life drama playing out in the disappearance of Savannah Guthrie’s mother is another contributing factor.) Local NBC affiliates have seen their own numbers spike. The Opening Ceremony of the Milan Games drove the highest search engagement rate ever for Olympic advertisers — up 63% over Beijing and 26% over Paris.

Viewers, it seems, don’t just watch the Olympics. They pay attention to it.

Is there risk in this dependency? Of course there is. The 2032 Brisbane Summer Games present a brutal time zone problem for American audiences — most events will air overnight in the U.S., which is roughly the equivalent of scheduling the Super Bowl at 3 a.m. and hoping for the best. And the ongoing structural questions about whether Peacock can convert Olympic viewers into retained, paying subscribers remain genuinely unanswered, no matter how impressively the streaming numbers have grown.

But the 2028 Los Angeles Summer Games loom on the horizon like a promotional department’s fever dream. Which can be the only explanation for seeing Kate Hudson singing “California Dreamin’” in the LA ‘28 teaser last night. A domestic Olympics, in the nation’s second-largest media market, with most events airing in prime time across the entire country. NBC already has the rights through 2036, with the 2034 Winter Games coming to Utah as an additional gift.

If Paris was the proof of concept, and Milan-Cortina was the validation, Los Angeles will be the ultimate referendum.

In the meantime, the rest of the network television industry watches NBC count its medals and quietly wonders what it would be worth to have a franchise that, every two years, reminds an entire nation that there is still value in watching television together.

The answer, it turns out, is somewhere in the neighborhood of $7.75 billion.

And given what the Olympics keep delivering in return, we think that might actually be a bargain.

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(This column was prepared with the assistance of AI-based tools. That is so we have something to blame for any errors we may have inadvertently included herein.)