Matthew Silverstein
Matthew Silverstein is a writer.
Ten years of staff-writing rooms sit behind the one show Silverstein's name is actually attached to. He worked across 3rd Rock from the Sun, The Man Show, Action, Greg the Bunny, 3-South, The Goode Family, The Cleveland Show and Axe Cop, which is a tour of nearly every register of American network and cable comedy in that period, and none of it belongs to him in the way one series does.
That series is Drawn Together, created with Dave Jeser for Comedy Central. The premise was a reality-show house full of animated characters parodying other studios' properties, and the execution was deliberately, aggressively coarse, aimed squarely at the gap between what cartoons look like and what cartoons are permitted to say. It is not subtle and was never trying to be. It did produce a feature, The Drawn Together Movie: The Movie!, which is one more than most cancelled Comedy Central cartoons manage.
He also created the MTV animated comedy DJ & the Fro in 2009 and co-wrote the screenplay for the film Accidental Love. More recently he was a creator on What Just Happened??! with Fred Savage.
Movies (1)
TV (3)
Where to start with Matthew Silverstein
Everything routes through Drawn Together, so watch a first-season episode before deciding anything: the show's reputation rests on its worst excesses, but the construction underneath is sharper than that, and the reality-television parody is doing more work than the shock material it is famous for. If it is not for you, you will know quickly.
The Drawn Together Movie: The Movie! is for people who finished the series and wanted it to sign off properly. It is meaner and more self-aware than the show ever was.
What Just Happened??! with Fred Savage is the odd one out, a straight-faced parody of a talk show about a television show, and it is the most conceptually interesting thing on the list even if it is the least seen. His writing on other people's series is not among the credits listed here.