Kevin Reilly Does the Fox-trot

Last week's rumors about Kevin Reilly have become reality. Two months after he was pushed out of NBC to make room for wunderkind Ben Silverman, Reilly is back running a network, this time at Fox. Fox's current entertainment president, Peter Liguori, who helped facilitate the hire, has been bumped up to Fox Entertainment President. As Variety points out, Liguori and Reilly are old pals, having worked together at FX, where they prgrammed such hit shows as Nip/Tuck and The Shield, until Reilly moved over to NBC in 2003.

For Liguori, who engineered the whole reorg, it's an opportunity to move up and focus more on his strengths -- managing the net's big-picture programming, marketing and interactive initiatives -- and leave the day-to-day development to Reilly, an exec lauded for his creative chops.

And for Reilly it's a chance to go from worst to first -- having been pushed out of the fourth-rated broadcast web only to land at the top-rated one.

"I feel like I've won the lotto somehow," Reilly said.

Reilly has said that he wasn't "overly wounded" by the ouster that put Silverman and Marc Graboff in charge at NBC, but "on a competitive level, I was pissed." It was only six weeks ago that Reilly was standing in front of advertisers at the upfronts, presenting his schedule. Now it will be his job to try to take down the very shows he created. "I work for Fox now," Reilly told Variety, "and I look forward to giving NBC a hard time."

In the two years that he ran NBC, Reilly had acquired a reputation for having tastes that were narrow. His defenders say he was too hamstrung at the Peacock and wasn't able to put his personal stamp on the line-up. Reilly told the New York Times that he intends to reach out to the creators of shows with a message that things would be different in his tenure at Fox. "There is going to be no paranoia about hidden agendas," he said. "We are going to speak with one voice." From the NYT:

Mr. Liguori said that at Fox, Mr. Reilly would enjoy an advantage he never had at NBC: programming from a position of strength. "We have been the No. 1 network for three straight years, and last week we finished first for the 22nd week in a row," Mr. Liguori said, referring to Fox's performance in the audience category preferred by most advertisers, viewers ages 18 to 49. "Kevin will have a situation where he can build on success."

He will also enjoy the advantage of having television's most formidable show, "American Idol," on his side, rather than having to figure out ways to avoid being run over by it. "It's nice to be able to sidestep that roller coaster," he said.