It's Time for NBC to Fire Ben Silverman

There are several reasons to think NBC's decision to give Jay Leno a nightly 10 p.m. show will backfire. The slot may prove too early for late-night viewers, who tend to be creatures of habit. It could create an unsustainable booking logjam as three different NBC talk shows fight for the same guests. It could sour the network's relationship with Conan O'Brien, who not so long ago was considered more important to its long-term prospects.

But let's say it works. It's still a sign that the time has come to fire Ben Silverman, co-chairman of NBC Entertainment.

Of Silverman, The Wall Street Journal's story on the Leno move says only that it could give him "a smaller canvas to work on, and could signal a diminished role for him at the network." The New York Times doesn't even mention Silverman in its story.

That's striking, but fitting. The Leno maneuver wasn't about creating new programming; it was about playing defense -- "safety first," as NBC Universal chairman Jeff Zucker said over and over at the UBS media conference yesterday. It's meant to accomplish two things: keeping Leno from jumping to a rival network and diminishing NBC's programming costs in primetime.

NBC didn't hire Silverman to play defense. It hired him because he was a hit-maker -- the mover behind the American versions of The Office, Ugly Betty and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? But a year and a half after his arrival, Silverman has failed utterly to produce any fresh triumphs for NBC -- failed so utterly that now the network can only see the downside of the time slot where mega-hits like ER and CSI are born.

At the UBS conference, Zucker was asked, as he has been in the past, if he's lost confidence in Silverman. Zucker said he hadn't, noting that NBC is far from the only network to show ratings declines this season. If performing only a little worse than its peer group is truly NBC Universal's new metric for success, that says a lot. But at a time when the conglomerate is laying off hundreds, even from its divisions that are thriving, there's no justification for keeping someone like Silverman -- an expensive reminder of the network's shriveled ambitions -- on the books.

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