Ben Silverman, NBC's chief programmer, has described himself as a "next generation, rock star" television executive.
Last weekend he was in New York: dining with actress Brooke Shields, popping up on the set of the season premiere of "Saturday Night Live" and hobnobbing with advertisers at an NFL game.
Silverman spent much of August abroad, attending the Olympics in Beijing, meeting with foreign TV executives and then celebrating his 38th birthday in Europe with Sting, Billy Joel and the head of Britain's Conservative Party.
In his 15 months at the network, Silverman has set off more chatter about his lifestyle, job status and time away from the office than buzz about his upcoming shows. In addition, agents, producers and even NBC executives have been aggravated by his chief deputy's aggressive promotion of her live-in boyfriend's proposed TV show -- a conflict of interest that was becoming an embarrassment for the network.
Resolution came with a price tag: NBC recently paid $1.75 million to buy out the remainder of her boyfriend's contract so the project would go away, according to a person close to the situation. It followed Silverman's own entanglements with conflicts of interest, which led him to sell his production company that was supplying shows to the network.
NBC's new season, which kicks off Monday, will help determine whether NBC Universal extends Silverman's employment beyond June, when his two-year contract expires. That is, if Silverman doesn't decide to leave first.
"Ben is young and rich; he's not doing this because he is hungry," said USC communications professor Jonathan Taplin, who worked with Silverman when he was a TV producer. "Sure, he wants to be famous, but at the end of the day, he can take this job or leave it."
Indeed, his job -- co-chairman of NBC Entertainment and its TV production studio -- is to fix the network's five-year ratings slide. With few breakout shows in the last four years, NBC desperately needs a new hit, or two. The network's prime-time shows once were a moneymaking machine. In 2004, NBC earned $900 million in profit from prime-time alone. But, by 2007, with ratings sinking, it barely topped $100 million.
Silverman has won praise within NBC Universal, a unit of General Electric Co., for saving money through co-production deals on big-budget shows and by increasing revenue by inviting advertisers to pay to get their products plugged into story lines.
