NEW YORK, NY.- About six hours before Celine Dion gutted out the final number of the Paris Olympics opening ceremony, streaming service Peacock emailed a promo for its coverage with the headline, “We’ll all be crying by the end of this.” So maybe it knew more than it was letting on.

The homestretch of the marathon four-hour broadcast, when the celebrating athletes and dance extravaganzas and speeches were out of the way, had some starkly lovely images and moving moments: the speedboat carrying former champions up the Seine in the dark (like a real-life echo of Leos Carax’s great water-skiing scene in “Les Amants du Pont-Neuf”). The grand scale and dramatic lighting of the Louvre as the torch was carried, like a firefly’s flame, through its courtyards. The torch coming to the hand of a 100-year-old French cyclist, steady in his wheelchair, and Dion defying her illness to belt out “Hymne à l’Amour” on the Eiffel Tower.

But it took endurance to get there — for the athletes, performers and spectators drenched by the summer rain, and for the viewers at home watching the ceremony as it was conceived by the French organizers and packaged by NBC and Peacock.

The decision to abandon the event’s traditional format — the long, formal parade of athletes marching into a stadium — for a waterborne procession along the Seine intercut with performances had a twofold effect. It turned the ceremony into something bigger, more various and more intermittently entertaining. But it also turned it into something more ordinary — just another bloated made-for-TV spectacle, like a halftime show or awards show or holiday parade that exists to promote and perpetuate itself.

Those spectacles can be fun, of course, and the traditional Olympics opening ceremony could feel dull and interminable. But it was not quite like anything else, and it played a key part in making the Games feel special.

As the boats ferrying the athletes moved along the Seine, what stood out was what was missing. The great mass of athletes in one place, moving in a continuous tide. The chaotic palette of national costumes, the different marching styles, the proud flag bearers. Few events more effectively combined the monumental and the individual.

Everything about Friday’s ceremony and broadcast worked to diminish the athletes. Sitting in cheering clumps, sometimes three and four countries together, they looked like passengers on party boats competing to make the most noise, to signal that their country was having the most fun.

And in the ceremony’s new format, they had to share screen time. The athletes’ parade disappeared for long stretches, or was reduced to a split-screen box, while the entertainment portion took over. In taped segments and on stages along the river, a great number of talented musicians and dancers took part in a presentation that was, in a certain sense, quintessentially French: titillating, hermetic, light on humor and heavy on pretense. Daring you not to find it dull.

The scale of the ceremony, 3 1/2 miles from end to end, with much of its action taking place on or beside a wide river, made it a natural TV event. Spectators could only see what was in front of them and that not very well; when we saw them cheering, they were most likely reacting to images on a nearby monitor.

But neither was there the sense that the TV viewer had the best vantage. The athletes on their boats still looked far away; the production numbers were not inventively staged for the cameras. Time and again, you got the feeling that what you were watching would be more exciting and moving if you were seeing it live, as it passed by. Juliette Armanet’s rendition of “Imagine,” performed on a barge, with a blazing piano, through a rain-spotted lens, had an element of high camp on screen; seen from the Trocadéro, it was probably spine-tingling.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.