Amber Ruffin to cover Tokyo Olympics; Snoop Dogg, Kevin Hart to recap games for Peacock
The popular personalities will be among a celebrity contingent covering the Games for the hometown audience
Thanks to Sha’Carri Richardson and several other qualifying athletes that have been announced this week, the Tokyo Olympics are shaping up to be more compelling than many of us may have expected.
And as if that wasn’t reason enough to celebrate, now Amber Ruffin, Kevin Hart and Snoop Dogg have been announced amongst those covering the summer games.
Wednesday, Deadline confirmed that Ruffin would be on the ground in Tokyo to cover the Olympics for Peacock.
Before writing hilarious skits for Seth Meyers on Late Night or helming her own late-night series, The Amber Ruffin Show, Ruffin coached gymnastics after graduating from high school and even once had dreams of pursuing a career in coaching full time.
In fact, she’s since revealed that one of her best-known skits, Amber Says What was inspired after she saw the flagbearer from Tonga in the 2016 Olympics and found herself riddled with humorous questions about what she was witnessing.
“That guy from Tonga had all that oil on him and no clothes and I was like, ‘What!?! There are families at home watching this and your thighs, sir, are glistening.’ So I just wrote a ‘What’ about that Olympics, and we ended up doing it again,” she previously told NPR.
Given her background in sports and penchant for witty hot takes, her involvement in the Tokyo Games will undoubtedly add some color to the usual Olympics commentary.
On the heels of the announcement about Ruffin, Peacock also revealed that Hart and Snoop – who are both apparently “Olympics enthusiasts” – will be recapping the Olympics for the NBCUniversal streaming service.
According to a synopsis via The Wrap, Olympic Highlights with Kevin Hart and Snoop Dogg will be a “hilariously funny commentary series,” in which the two men “will recap the Olympics’ most impressive displays of athleticism, as well as the moments that don’t go as planned.”
“Kevin and Snoop will be your comedy guides through the Tokyo Olympics,” Peacock notes in its logline.
Hart’s LOL Studios will be producing Olympic Highlights with Kevin Hart and Snoop Dogg with Paul Pawlowski serving as showrunner and executive producer. Hart, along with Jeff Clanagan, and Candice Wilson Cherry will also be serving as executive producers.
Even though local COVID-19 spikes in the Japanese capital city made it seem doubtful that the previously postponed Tokyo Olympics would still occur this summer, sources say host network NBC remained pretty confident that things would proceed as planned.
Not surprisingly, the decision to push forward amidst an ongoing pandemic has drawn critics. Most notably there has been pushback from broadcasting veteran Bob Costas, who anchored NBC’s Olympics coverage for 12 Olympic Games over two decades. He moved on from that coverage in 2017.
In late May during a sit down with Bill Maher, Costas criticized the International Olympic Committee’s ties to dictatorial governments and told the talk show host that he believes the Tokyo Olympic games should be postponed again.
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