Olympics so far: The visuals are pretty. The picture isn't.

Also: Maybe Brian Williams can take over for Jay Leno ... because Bob Costas just took over for Williams.

Who could have predicted that the biggest Olympic cheating scandal wouldn't involve any of the athletes?

After one week of the Beijing Games, NBC is enjoying audiences larger than it projected; the USA teams are performing as well or better than anyone expected; and the wow factor for these Olympics is much higher than I'd anticipated.

And yet, if there is one storyline that no one either at NBC or the Chinese overseers of these Games could have imagined emerging from the first week, it was the outrage over revelations that portions of the dazzling opening ceremony had been faked.

One striking minute-long sequence showed fireworks going off in the middle of Beijing along the course of a mile leading up to the national stadium (or Bird's Nest) where the ceremony was taking place. As viewers watched, the light show in the sky appeared to have been perfectly tracked by a helicopter-cam. If you had just tuned in, you might even have thought it was opening shot from "CSI."

As it turned out, that comparison was unfair to "CSI." A Beijing newspaper reported later that a much brighter set of footprints had been recreated in a CGI effects lab and shown on television instead of the real fireworks.

Why they were recreated was unclear. An Olympic official, defending the visual trickery, cited safety concerns with having a helicopter shoot fireworks from above. Another explanation, from the same official, was that it would be too difficult to get the 29 different explosions on camera. (As it was, according to the London Telegraph, the fake fireworks took nearly a year to make in the lab.)

NBC figured out a way to be truthy about the sham fireworks without really calling attention to their shamminess. "Today" show co-host Matt Lauer, who was helping call the ceremony, told viewers they were looking at "a cinematic device employed by Zhang Yimou," the action-film director who oversaw the opening ceremony.

Lauer then referred to the sequence as "almost animation." In fact, it was actual animation.

That might not have been such a big deal by itself, but the Chinese cover-up deepened when two more deceptions were revealed later in the week. The New York Times revealed Tuesday that Lin Miaoke, the 9-year-old girl seen in the ceremony gliding through the stadium suspended by a wire, was substituted at the last minute for another girl whose looks were deemed "not suitable" by party officials. However, her voice was judged to be just fine, so they used it, and told little Lin to hold the microphone and lip-synch.

The Times said the producers were "under pressure from the highest levels of the ruling Communist Party to find the perfect face and voice," and failing that, they settled on a hybrid without telling anybody.

Joe Bua, a blogger and reader of mine, summed up the resulting outrage of many viewers: "I knew the footprints thing was CGI, but the swap of the little girls is beyond the pale. Years from now, one girl has a video record of the event, the other has the memory of not being cute enough.

"Whoever decided that is evil."

Or just poorly versed in the ways of an open and free press. Perhaps the Cultural Revolution was going on when the movie version of "My Fair Lady" was released; otherwise the Chinese should have known you can't have someone lip-synch in front of millions without the media finding out.

And then on Friday, the Times Online revealed a third bit of deception. Remember those 56 children who walked into the stadium dressed in the garb of China's 56 ethnic minorities? Oops - they were all actually members of the country's Han majority.

This last instance was especially egregious because it crossed the line from illusion - which many Western PR campaigns engage in - to lying, which as John Edwards will attest, you just can't spin. China may have done a pretty good job of replicating American manufacturing techniques, but it's still got a ways to go when it comes to learning how our PR machine works.

And indeed, the ethnic-minorities story popped bigger than it ever would have on its own, because it was immediately added to an ever-growing list of cover-ups. The whole kerfuffle might have been avoided had Chinese officials simply admitted, before the event, that there would be some movie magic going on during the ceremony. NBC announcers could then have explained what was going on in clear, non-obfuscational language.

While they were at it, they might have also told us that the opening ceremony had been extended by 27 minutes over its actual 50-minute running length to make room for numerous commercial breaks. (Even better, NBC could have shaken down one of its corporate sponsors to do one of those "limited commercial interruption" deals and cut down on the number of breaks.) Also, would it have killed Bob Costas to tell us that the Parade of Nations was edited for time?

And after that litany of complaints, I realize that any praise for NBC's high-definition Olympics will seem faint by comparison. But I'll try anyway: I have never watched a Summer or Winter Games where I was so bombarded with spectacular, gasp-inducing, utterly riveting video.

I'm the first to admit that I like seeing people from my home country win. And that they did, a lot, during the first week. And when they did, it seemed NBC cameras had 14 different replays at the ready.

Also, the fact that these games were able to broadcast so much live to the Central and Eastern time zones helped. The time lag between Kansas City and Beijing is 13 hours, which means many events can be covered as they happen -- with a little help from Olympics schedulers who know what time is prime time in America.

But part of the overwhelming feeling was simply a product of sheer volume. Not only is this the first all-HD Olympics but the first to offer thousands of hours of online video of non-televised events. NBC has far more material to draw upon for highlights than in any previous Games it's covered.

True, you have to install a new version of the Silverlight media module on your web browser to watch them, and that process did not go smoothly for me (a tech-savvy Mac owner). But the trouble was worth it -- the online video is the best I've ever seen for a screen that size, and navigation was fluid and glitch-free.

The commentators were by and large good at what they did, and I include Rowdy Gaines, the former Olympian and longtime booth announcer for the swimming events. However, I found myself getting increasingly annoyed by Gaines' relentless chatter about all the world records being broken. As Olympic-savvy viewers already knew, Speedo has introduced a new “high-tech swimsuit” that is being credited by most experts as the reason for the sudden decline in race times. It's legal doping and should be treated as such. Instead, it was like the 1998 home-run chase all over again, with Gaines and his colleague Dan Hicks blindly enthusing about all the feats of strength.

“That's the first time anyone has broken 1:55!” Gaines yelled after the Italian Federica Pellegrini broke the mark in the women's 200-meter freestyle. Later that night, during another race, Hicks asked, “and how many world records are we going to see here?”

Oh, I don't know, but let me guess: A lot?

Still, there was no denying the tremendous drama of the men's 4x100 freestyle relay final, where the underdog Americans beat the Frenchmen, whose star swimmer had made an ill-advised victory prediction that made Michael Phelps' reluctance to say anything interesting to the news media more understandable.

However, NBC didn't shy away from Olympic drama that didn't end in USA wins. For instance, the stunning equalizer by the Dutch men's soccer team, in the 90th minute of a match that the Americans seemed to have in hand, was featured in highlight reels the first weekend of play.

Other highlights made their way around the Web without any help from NBC, like the horrific footage of Hungarian weightlifter Baranyai János, whose arm popped out of its socket as he attempted to hold a 300-pound barbell above his head.

The presence of NBC News anchor Brian Williams in Beijing didn't stop its top sports anchor from making news. President Bush stopped by the NBC broadcast center for a little chat with Costas, presumably about such topics as meeting with the Redeem Team. Instead, Costas grilled him for a very long eight minutes about China's human rights record and its refusal to let a prominent dissident in the country, as well as demanding an update on the deteriorating situation between Russia and Georgia.

Finally, Costas asked what sports Bush was going to see on Monday.

"I'm going to swimming here -- if you'd ever let me off this set," Bush said in his kidding-not-kidding way.

Costas is an excellent observer of the media. I'm sure he's aware that some of the frankest interviews with the president have happened when he wasn't expecting a full-court press. The resulting give-and-take was yet another Olympic highlight from week one.