The Office's Ryan Howard isn't the only NBC character tribute to Ben Silverman, the young "Paris Hilton" exec of programming at the station. Tina Fey also based a 30 Rock character off of the young wunderkind: the closeted slimeball Devin Banks, portrayed with a deep throaty rasp by Will Arnett.
"There are probably four," she quickly replied (even though the show actually went on the air a season before Silverman started at NBC). The nearest, she reckoned, is the devious executive Devin Banks, played by Will Arnett, who is trying to outmaneuver Fey's onscreen boss, Alec Baldwin, for the top job at GE.
One day on the set, Fey recalled, Arnett was waiting to shoot a scene and, noting that he was wearing a silver-hued suit, was goofing around: "Look, I'm a silver man — get it?"
With two of NBC's best comedies already taking potshots at the golden calf, can we predict Ben's future by looking at what happened to his alter-egos? CONTINUED »
It's hard to distinguish between writer/actor/comedian B.J. Novak and his alter-ego Ryan Howard from The Office, notably because Novak hasn't done much else besides the NBC show. Sure, there were a couple episodes of Punk'd he was on, like that time he pretended to be a really bad driving instructor to Hillary Duff, and he was in that one scene in Reign Over Me, but for the most part B.J. is Ryan: a wunderkind who came out of nowhere and rose to the top and seems a little cocky about it. Sort of like NBC executive producer Ben Silverman, who Ryan is supposedly based on.
With The Office season premiere tomorrow, now is as good a time as any to look back at the solo work of the young man who just told The New York Times: "I don’t see the value in quote-unquote brilliant things that people don’t like, and I don’t see the value in things that people like that I don’t respect:"
