The Chairman

Keeping up with Ben Silverman is a little like keeping up with your debonaire friend, the highly educated, slightly hyper, channel surfer who, like you, knows way too much about television. Only he knows way more about it and has a social conscience. In a span of seconds he’s talking about the imperative of making The Biggest Loser more than just a show with fat people fighting; how Ugly Betty is not only the struggle of an immigrant and a modern day My Fair Lady and Pygmalion but has now empowered actress America Ferrera to go out into the real world and inspire young people to fight for democracy, or whatever; how the last thing you want a TV show to do is become like the New York Times putting a nice color photo of a horrible scene in Iraq on the front page everyday until everybody goes right for the sports section. In Miami recently, one was able to glimpse an hour or so of the reality show that is Manhattan native Ben Silverman’s professional life. One minute he’s with several Latin pop music stars on the stage of a beautiful 1920s era movie theater, talking about TV and philanthropy. The next he’s out in the second-floor lobby listening to two guys with a plan to unleash a cancer awareness virus inside the network’s programming. Now he’s talking with a magazine writer about how NBC did a similar thing recently with its Green Week.

“All our shows had green messages, from the Today show to The Tonight Show to Heroes to The Office,” he says. “Instead of just doing one concept, we turned the whole network green for a week, and the whole company. And we’re looking constantly at ways in which we can educate while entertaining. Clearly, entertaining is our main business drive, but I think more and more there’s opportunities where good business and good art come together. Doing well while doing good.” It helps to have a parent company (General Electric) that requires its TV subsidiary to promote environmental awareness, he notes. “They have a huge green initiative and they are making investments in alternative fuels. And on the television side, the green initiatives are a mandate from the corporate parent, not just something that came up from below,” he explains. “Now they’re married together quite nicely because we all have taken it on and are proud of it. But that doesn’t mean they’re saying, ‘We’ll give you a quarter off of making money.’ They’re just saying, ‘Do this, too.’”

The do-well-and-good duality also fueled Reveille, the production company Silverman founded around the turn of the century and sold this past February for $125 million (to the British firm Shine Group). Channel surfing in London in 2001 in Reveille’s early days, Silverman clicked into a show called The Office and it stopped him in his tracks. He resolved to produce an American version, which eventually won an Emmy for best comedy in 2006. He and his Reveille unit, with the help of Salma Hayek and others, performed a similar trick with the transformation of the Colombian TV show Yo soy Betty la fea into Ugly Betty, which ended up on ABC. “I found it through a colleague seven years ago when it had just aired in Colombia, looked at the ratings, looked at the poster, and said, ‘Holy cow! That’s My Fair Lady, that’s Pygmalion, that is Taming of the Shrew. That is all of these things, but with this great physical hook and a contemporary vibe and a great, edgy title,” Silverman recalls.

He wasn’t exactly gunning for the burgeoning English-speaking Latino audience, though. “For me it wasn’t as much, ‘Hey how do we tap into this underserved niche that is growing into a mainstream force?’ as much as Betty la fea was an awesome television show, and I wanted to remake it and I knew it would work.” Reveille’s next large move was The Biggest Loser, a reality show in which obese contestants, put in physically and mentally stressful situations, compete to lose the most weight. (Prize: $250,000.) One of the goals was to attack “a massive obesity crisis in America,” Silverman says. He lost a few pounds himself trying to get NBC executives to see the show’s potential for transcending tawdry drama and spilling over into social service. “We set out to encourage America to lose a million pounds along with the people playing the show, and we’ve already doubled what we expected and already have 10,000 different clubs of people coming together trying to lose weight,” he avers proudly. The show needed to be “hard-hitting” to achieve such extensive audience engagement, he adds.

The accumulation of The Biggest Loser and other hits helped turn the daring producer into a huge winner. Silverman followed the show to NBC, when NBC Universal president and chief executive Jeff Zucker, in an attempt to beef up the network’s fourth-place ratings behind ABC, CBS, and Fox, hired him as co-chairman. Among the assets that factored into his decision, Zucker said, were Silverman’s international connections. As an agent with William Morris, for example, he’d had a hand in cross-continental deals that resulted in the American adaptations of Who Wants to Be A Millionaire and Survivor. Though one can’t be sure Silverman isn’t scanning in North Korea or Mongolia for hitherto untapped televisual phenomena, it’s clear that he continues to look southward. One of his first moves after joining NBC Entertainment was acquiring the rights to the controversial Colombian telenovela Sin Tetas No Hay Paraiso. This dark drama about a teenage prostitute who sees breast augmentation as her ticket out of poverty is billed for NBC’s 2008-2009 season. Too depressing? Then click over to something else until the U.S. remake of the Peruvian comedy Mi problema con las mujeres comes on. Reveille and producer Jay Weisleder are developing it for NBC, with Justin Timberlake slated to star as the young man who seeks advice from an unlikely therapist to understand why his romantic relationships keep failing. “I wouldn’t have done or pursued any of them had they not been as good as The Office, as good as Who Wants to Be A Millionaire is for a game show,” Silverman says. Or as great as The Biggest Loser, which is now being whipped into a Mexican version by Televisa, Mexico’s largest media conglomerate (whose publishing division partners with Page One Media to produce this magazine.)

Speaking of cultural imperialism, Silverman is hoping to further capture hearts and minds with The Philanthropist, a one-hour drama due to start airing in early 2009. Concept: Tired of throwing money around, a wild young billionaire rolls up his sleeves and plunges into Pakistani earthquakes, Ecuadorean floods, and the like. “The fact that our character, Teddy Rist, loves chicks, loves booze, loves his private jet doesn’t mean he doesn’t want to save the world,” Silverman says, his mind flashing perhaps to his own ritzy lifestyle. “The notion that philanthropy requires a Puritan is over,” he proclaims, then offers a droll anecdote. “My grandfather, who was a socialist, I used to challenge and say, ‘How can we eat at this Park Avenue restaurant, grandpa?’ And he would look at me and say, ‘I want everyone to eat at this Park Avenue restaurant.’” Thus, Silverman would like everyone to be able to sit back, relax, and watch The Philanthropist. “Is it going to be a breakout hit? God, I hope so,” he says. “I feel it’s going to tap into something all of us are feeling. Recession hitting, war hitting. But it’s also a case where I’d rather live or die with that show than with another cop show. You know what I mean?” The next minute he is across the street on the second floor of a historic bank building posing for a photo shoot, trying not to think about the 27 emails he’s received in the last five minutes. “You are so beautiful, you are so beautiful,” Silverman says playfully to a couple of attractive young women who are involved in the philanthropy forum. “Thank you for saving the world.” BlackBerry in hand, he hastens away in search of some isolation before a fancy lunch for conference participants. “I gotta go run NBC!”.