The news flash turned out to be a tad premature. NBC Universal chief executive Jeff Zucker and Silverman had been in talks for a week and a half but had yet to hammer out an agreement. Silverman admits the mysterious e-mail “accelerated our negotiations,” but he says he had nothing to do with the leak. “Oh, God no,” he says. “It ruined my weekend.” He was spending the holiday at the Montage, a resort in Laguna Beach that was crowded with Hollywood types. “People were all over me, shooting me e-mails, circling me. I literally had to go in my room and pace on the phone the entire time.”
The e-mail leak, Silverman gripes, foiled his publicity plan. “I wanted it to be the cover of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal,” he says with characteristic immodesty. And, he adds, he would have liked to be the one to break the news to Reilly. “I love Kevin and wanted to, at the right moment, tell him about it firsthand.”
Despite such statements of goodwill—and despite the fact that Reilly soon landed at Fox to take over its top-rated prime-time schedule—the whole affair has left a bad taste in the mouths of Reilly loyalists. One of the most outspoken has been ABC entertainment head Steve McPherson, a college buddy of Reilly’s, who blasted Silverman at an ABC press conference in July for pretending he had nothing to do with Reilly’s dismissal. “Was he living in a cave?” he said. “When someone stabs your best friend in the back, you don’t buy it.”
Silverman, of course, doesn’t need the admiration of the competition to succeed in his new role. It might help, however, if he and his boss agreed on a definition of success. Says Zucker, “The goal for Ben is to move NBC Entertainment forward in terms of its viewership and in terms of the number of successful programs he can bring to air.” Silverman, however, puts his own spin on it—with less of an emphasis on ratings: “What we are in is the business of television, not the rankings of television. It’s going to be hard for broadcast television to sustain its ratings when there are 500 networks and a million competing entertainment options.”
Either way, Silverman has been busy during his first few months looking for ways to kick-start the turnaround, whether by announcing that Jerry Seinfeld would return to prime time as a guest star on 30 Rock or adding former Grey’s Anatomy star Isaiah Washington to the cast of Bionic Woman. Silverman is also importing another Colombian hit telenovela, whose title translates to Without Breasts There Is No Paradise, about a flat-chested girl who becomes a prostitute to pay for a boob job. On the reality side, he’s greenlighted a seventh edition of Donald Trump’s The Apprentice, given the Joey Fatone–hosted The Singing Bee a slot on the fall schedule and announced Phenomenon, a version of the Israeli show hosted by spoon-bending mentalist Uri Geller. “I like quality with noise,” Silverman says. “Big, big, bold hits, you know, but that also have elements of profound engagement.”
