Word: diller
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...crowd of advertisers in New York's Radio City Music Hall to announce her first fall schedule. It was an aggressive lineup, with 10 new shows and several old ones in new time periods. Among the newcomers: Total Security, a Steven Bochco drama about a security firm; Hiller and Diller, starring Richard Lewis and Kevin Nealon as comedy writers with families; and two fantasy-comedies for the Friday-night kid audience, Genie and Teen Angel, both produced by corporate parent Disney...
...company's potential to match buyers and sellers is what caught Diller's eye. Diller and Tomlin first worked together at QVC; Diller was the chairman, Tomlin a high-tech executive who had phoned looking for a job after reading how much Diller loved his Powerbook. Both left QVC in the fall of 1994; a few months later, Diller recalls, Tomlin called him again: "'I've found these two guys in a garage...
...guys in question, Tom Sammon and Brad Scurlock, wanted to release an early iteration of their deep-interview software on CD-ROM and invited Diller to invest 5% or 10% of the necessary capital. Diller tested the product and counteroffered: he'd put in 100% if they would return to the garage until he deemed their product ready for prime time...
...which leads to what may be the most intriguing question of all: How does Consumer's Edge fit into Diller's long-range goals, which for big thinkers like him tend to amount to total world domination? Two years after his painful failures to merge QVC first with Paramount and then with CBS, Diller operates from a power base called Silver King Communications. It's a grab bag of second-tier media properties that includes the nation's sixth largest group of TV stations; the Home Shopping Network (HSN); the dormant production studio Savoy Pictures; and the Internet Shopping Network...
...will Diller be one of the CEOs who set them up? One can imagine--albeit with a bit of effort--some interactively televised descendant of Consumer's Edge and HSN merging with Silver King's stations and studio to become a force in 21st century media. In the absence of a brand name like Paramount or cbs, though, that would be a trick on a par with Diller's last one: building a fourth network on the backs of The Simpsons and Married...with Children...