• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, March 6, 2007

Selling TV programs is like taking the troops out on maneuvers, getting ready for the main action.

NBC's Mark Graboff, the president of NBC Universal Television West Coast, which made a deal with BermanBraun, a new high-profile production partnership featuring ex-network programming chiefs Gail Berman and Lloyd Braun, views TV as such: "Lloyd and Gail have great track records and very complementary skills," Graboff, told The New York Times. "Lloyd is a big idea guy, very competitive. He's like a heat-seeking missile. Gail is very talent friendly; she has great relationships with writers. The two of them make a killer team."

Heat-seeking missiles? Killer team? It sounds like the programming will be this side of a Molotov cocktail.

Great programming ideas kill, they say. One competing programming executive talks about the annual January arrival of "American Idol" as a "nuclear bomb," flattening all in its wake.

One might wonder if in these war-like, terrorist-threatening times, these metaphors really are necessary when we are talking about TV.

Grabbing big TV headlines with big production deal news can bring in better luck for NBC. NBC also figures that there is brand-name association that'll draw better writers and producers to BermanBraun. Graboff says the tandem is "a kind of label."

If TV is war, then there are casualties -- but they never seem that severe. TV producers can flop badly, but still survive.

It's kind of like the cheerleader in NBC's new hit, "Heroes," who can pop her smashed shoulder back into line or heal her severe burn wounds in seconds. TV is a video-game-like fantasy world for producers -- you can get hit with a mortar attack and still return to action.