The TV Zone

The two new guys who are running NBC's entertainment fortunes, Ben Silverman and Marc Graboff - Silgrab - seem like a couple of nice guys, but the new guys (whosoever they may be) always do at press tour. Thrown before the baying coyotes of the press who believe nothing and trust no one, the fresh meat usually has no choice but to seem nice. It is their only defense. In the absense of huge announcements or stunning coups - none from this morning, best I could tell - Silgrab had to rely on their native charms. At press tour, that only goes so far.

Silverman: He's got that youthful, rumpled, disarming style, distantly reminiscent of a youthful, rumpled and disarming Brandon Tartikoff. Graboff: A business guy, he's older and grimmer, with gimlet eyes and a no-nonsense manner. It's a good cop-bad-cop routine. In the weeks and months to come, as these two try to mince their way through a new schedule against a stiffening headwind, you can almost imagine how this tag-team will work. Silverman will tell every creator and wouldbe network hit maker how much he loves their idea, and Graboff will tell them in the follow-up meeting that it's too expensive. And so it will go.

Together they replace a popular - popular with press, not popular with G.E. - executive who is now working for Fox. (Kevin Reilly's Revenge Served Ice Cold this January? "American Idol.") But what can this duo do that Reilly could not?

Network television is all about generating hit shows, and how that is done remains one of the great elusive arts of popular culture. Silverman, when he ran Reveille, understood that pop tastes often have no boundary (he shopped internationally, and found templates for shows as diverse as "Ugly Betty" and "Survivor.") But network schedules are also products of multiple agendas. Can Silverman adjust to a world where interference and second-guessing are management tools of choice? Can Silgrab work when the track record for other hydra-headed teams (Jamie Tarses/Lloyd Braun) is mixed?

And if youth must be served, then why - for their first official act at the press tour - did Silgrab announce the appointment of Norman Lear, as the consultant/creator/guiding force of a new hour-long battle-of-the-sexes dramedy set on Wall Street? Lear's last great triumph was "The Jeffersons," deep in the last century. And so this is what might be called a mixed-message-move: By name along, Lear invokes the great years of network past, but it is a past all of the networks are actively disavowing. But the message may not be so mixed after all: We can't really escape our past after all, can we?

First question Silverman got was barbed, and referred to Reilly's contract that NBC bought out just a month or so after renewing it: "Ben, what would you say about a company that hires somebody for $6 million and fires them after a month? Is that a good company or a bad company?"

Ben: "Do you know what? I hope our shows and our results speak for what we're doing. And you know, I only arrived, so all I can say is, we're really excited about what we're doing today and what we're going to be doing tomorrow and what you'll be watching in the fall."

Graboff then got a crack at that one: "He [Reilly] wasn't fired. What happened was when Ben became available about three months after we made Kevin's new deal, we jumped at the opportunity to bring Ben on board to the company....Kevin, when that happened, realized or determined, frankly, that there was just no role for him at the company and decided to move on."

That got the biggest laugh of the whole day. If they could only write sitcom lines this funny.

Silverman was also asked the obvious question - just what sort of investment do you have in all these new shows that you didn't even put on the air in the first place?

"I am so happy to build on the legacy of quality that has been NBC's hallmark. From the days I began watching television, it was always tuned to NBC, and that tradition continues and I'm excited to build upon it and thrilled wherever the hits come from, existing or through new doors. It's great."

Okay, smarty-pants. What else did you expect him to say? "I hate Reilly's crop. It's doomed, I tell you, doomed."

Anyway, those were canned responses to questions they anticipated, the ones they had prepared answers for. All that matters now is the fall.

Us coyotes await.

Silgrab: How long will this marriage last?