It's hardly a shocker to read the news that Ben Silverman is finally -- after a year of breathless speculation -- out at NBC, having announced that he is leaving his post as network entertainment chief to form a new venture with Barry Diller, a longtime Silverman mentor and perhaps the oldest living new-media mogul on the planet.
The immediate spin is that NBC had enough of Silverman, who enjoyed a relatively short, unhappy life at the media conglomerate, being perhaps the worst fit ever as the head of a corporate media TV unit.
On the other hand, you could argue that Silverman finally had enough of NBC, which is, under Jeff Zucker, one of the worst places ever to serve as a top executive, since when anything goes wrong at the top, Zucker is a master at deflecting the bad news away from himself and directly at his luckless corporate underlings. (Which is why NBC Universal film chiefs Marc Shmuger and David Linde, now in the midst of an ever-deepening summer box-office slump, should be very, very worried, despite having Ron Meyer in their corner, because Zucker's reach, when it comes to laying blame, is very, very long.)
I met Silverman a couple of times over the years and came away from our last lunch together both impressed and concerned -- impressed because Silverman was full of energy, loaded with bright ideas and not a prisoner to the ways of the past; concerned because someone as iconoclastic and as undisciplined as Silverman was a poor fit for the job of masterminding the programming of an old-fashioned broadcast network, an institution that seems especially resistant to change.
Silverman's high-living personal life earned him far too much notoriety than was good for him. If Universal wanted a raunchy hit comedy, the studio should just buy the rights to Silverman's life -- they could market the picture as "The Hangover 2." One media sultan I spoke to, who has spent a lot of time with Silverman over the years, acknowledged that "I've never had dinner with Ben and the same girl twice." As the Vulture blog joked Monday, Silverman's NBC successor, Jeff Gaspin, is so buttoned-down that "we've been unable to track down a single photo of him skiing, a YouTube video of him singing topless or any published evidence that he's ever rented a white tiger for a house party." But his personal excesses aside, Silverman probably will have more of an impact in Diller Land, since Diller is the embodiment of what today's mega-media conglomerates lack: the spirit of entrepreneurialism.
