Remember television commercials?  You know, those things that aired in the middle of your favorite shows and gave you just enough time to go to the bathroom or get a drink.  Thanks to DVRs and TiVO we’ve been able to escape the advertisers grasp – not for long.  Now it looks like the push is to have the advertisements become the shows.  You might be thinking “glorified infomercials” here right?  Well, not really. It’s actually something that I’ve been talking about for a little while now – turning the commercials into mini-shows themselves.  It’s a creative idea, it’s something that needs to be done and it works perfectly with where television is heading . . . online.

Someone listened to me, I guess, and his name is Ben Silverman – former NBC Entertainment co-chairman.  Silverman left NBC this summer to begin a company called Electus at Barry Diller’s IAC/InterActiveCorp.  Silverman’s model is to incorporate the advertisers into the development of the script.   There isn’t much to go on yet, but from what I’m reading it sounds like the shows would be developed exclusively around products and services – like product placement only bigger.  The thought of this may frighten you a bit but wait until you hear who signed up for this project – Ryan Seacrest, America Ferrera, Jason Bateman and Will Arnett.  Bateman and Arnett’s new production company, DumbDumb, is working with College Humor to create some of this new style of programming.  This should make you feel much better.  If you’ve watched anything from College Humor, you know that the programming will be funny – and as an Arrested Development fan, there isn’t enough good stuff that I can say about Jason Bateman and Will Arnett.  These shows (or whatever this genre will soon be called) will definitely be creative, edgy and funny.

Silverman’s Electus just signed a deal to bring this original content to Yahoo.  This means that we’re only talking about online content for now, but it won’t be long before this bleeds over to network prime.  It actually makes perfect sense.  Ad revenues are down these days and in light of Fox’s recent move to demand money from Time Warner for retransmission – it isn’t going to be long before “free television” starts to shrink.  You might have noticed the campaign by the National Association of Broadcasters to educate Americans on this subject.  This is becoming a big deal.

I’m actually curious to see what Silverman’s group comes up with.  To me content is content and as long as we’re not talking about glorified informercials, it might be interesting.  Some people speculate that it will be a throw-back to the 50’s and 60’s where shows had sponsors.  I’m thinking that it’s going to be a little more involved and much more creative.  Personally,  I’m up for anything that competes with all of those reality shows anyway.  Seriously.  Anything.