Ben Silverman: NBC’s downhill racer

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With Ben Silverman’s latest show, ‘Parks and Recreation,’ premiering tonight (and plenty of fresh powder still on his favorite ski slopes in Aspen), New York magazine’s delightfully cheeky Vulture blog decided to razz the embattled NBC chief by running an elaborate graph illustrating the ratings performance of Silverman’s shows -- the joke being that the graph takes the form of a steep, black diamond-like ski slope. (The skier pictured on the downhill slope is Silverman himself, in ski togs.)

So how is the fast-talking, fast-living exec doing in his first two years on the job? According to Vulture’s count, of the 23 series created after Silverman took command of NBC in May 2007, 15 have been canceled, 5 are on life-support and 3 are, as Vulture put it, ‘Still Alive (For Now!).’ There’s also a helpful graph detailing the number of Emmys won by all those new shows (it’s empty, since none were won) as well as a pie chart tracking the shows that were canceled the quickest, the winner being ‘Quarterlife,’ which was dropped from the schedule after one airing.

Silverman plays a supporting role in a smart story in today’s Times by our crack TV reporter Meg James. She makes sense of another strange turn of events at the troubled network, explaining how programming exec Angela Bromstad is doing after first leaving NBC after losing a power struggle, then returning to help restore order late last year after Silverman’s fall prime-time schedule had collapsed. It would be hard to find a network going through more tumult than NBC, which if nothing else, makes for great reading. One silver lining: As long as the ratings are so awful, the network wouldn’t dare cancel ’30 Rock.’