NBC Blunderkind Ben Silverman Leaving to Join Barry Diller

Rejoice, Ben Silverman haters: The Co-Chairman of NBC Entertainment and NBC Universal Studio is stepping down in order to go work for Barry Diller's IAC/InterActiveCorp. (Diller must have a special fondness for young men with floppy hair: This weekend he also announced a deal to fund Notional, a production company headed by 28-year-old College Humor founder Ricky Van Veen.) Silverman, whom we fingered last week as a possible scapegoat in Conan O'Brien's Tonight Show stumbling [internal link], will stay with NBC through September.

Ever since Silverman came to NBC in 2007 (after running an independent production company, Reveille), he has been the target of press vitriol. A November 2007 Esquire profile of Silverman set the tone, with the writer Matthew Belloni writing, "Few doubt Silverman's talent as a dealmaker, but critics wonder if that's all he is, if his skills are limited to peddling formats rather than developing good shows from scratch. They also say he's little more than an effective networker and promoter, mostly of himself, and that the party boy who is rumored to have trashed a William Morris colleague's office on a drunken bender (true, he says) and who supposedly delayed his GE-mandated drug test to flush his system (not true, he insists) isn't mature enough for a network's top job."

Deadline Hollywood Daily's Nikki Finke has been particularly rough on Silverman, but she has yet to publish one of her signature gloating "TOLDJA!" posts on his departure.