Channel Changer

摘要

IT'S hard enough to persuade one person to fall in love with a product. Now try 3 million, seven nights a week. Such is the power of Bonnie Hammer, newly minted head of seven cable channels at NBC Universal. In 2003 she revived the SyFy channel, luring in viewers with Ron Moore's revamped Battlestar Galactica. Then Hammer took over as president of the USA Network, where she linked beefy wrestlers (WWE) to quivering neurotics (Monk) under the chirpy rubric "Characters Welcome." And it worked: USA has been the number one basic cable network for five years, valued at $11.7 billion. The 60-year-old Queens native explains her plans to make other NBC Universal channels grab your eyeballs.