CNBC Series a Sort of Homecoming for CEO Dad Creator
By Staff -- Broadcasting & Cable, 4/8/2007 4:01:00 AM
CNBC’s recently announced plans to adapt the comic strip CEO Dad into a series this fall will be the network’s first foray into animation. But, for Tom Stern, the comic’s creator, the series represents a kind of homecoming.
Stern, whose humorous self-help book CEO Dad: How To Avoid Getting Fired by Your Family is out this month from Black-Davis Publishing, created the strip after realizing how much he had allowed his success as an executive recruiter to alienate his family. But before he transformed into the sort of family-phobic workaholic he satirizes in his comic strip, Stern was an aspiring standup comic who did a stint developing comedy on HBO. What’s more, Stern’s father is Alfred R. Stern, a former NBC executive and PBS chairman who started cable company Television Communications Inc. in 1962 and merged it with Warner Communications Inc. 10 years later. (He was also honored by this magazine with the 1976 Distinguished Leadership award.) According to his author bio, Stern attributes his own destructive overachieving to his father, who “had no time for a needy, bed-wetting son with ADHD and dyslexia.” Let’s hope the CNBC series is the final step in Stern’s recovery.
