Bonnie Hammer’s Hit Factory

Bonnie Hammer is in a buoyant mood on a rainy May morning as she arrives on a Long Island production set of Royal Pains, a new series for USA Network. As the channel's CEO, she has plenty of reasons to be happy. In March, the network had scored its 11th straight quarter as the nation's top-rated cable outlet—averaging 3.2 million viewers in prime time, the biggest audience ever in cable. With luck, Royal Pains would help the streak continue. The series, starring Mark Feurstein as a physician who serves as a concierge-style doctor to superrich Hamptonites, is filming a lavish party scene in a rented 87-room Tudor mansion. It would be a complicated day of shooting regardless of the circumstances: the set is overrun with a cast and crew of 200, including an entire ballet troupe for one scene. The presence of Hammer—wearing a black fitted skirt, white blouse, and fierce heels, seated in a director's chair—only ups the ante. "I hope nothing gets screwed up," says Michael Rauch, an executive producer of the series. "There couldn't be more pressure than if God was on the set."

Hammer, a 33-year veteran of the television industry, knows about pressure. Since she took over in 2004, USA has produced a string of hits: Burn Notice, about a spy who's been fired; Psych, about a crime-solving police consultant who pretends to be psychic; In Plain Sight, focusing on a U.S. marshal aiding people in the witness-protection program. Along with CNBC, MSNBC, Bravo, and Telemundo, USA is controlled by General Electric's struggling NBC Universal. (Newsweek is a content partner with MSNBC.) Of all NBCU's properties, including the namesake broadcaster NBC and its Universal studio, USA has become the biggest earner, delivering roughly $1 billion in profits last year. "As for operating profits, it's the most important network," says Jeff Gaspin, president of NBC's Universal Television Group, who gives much of the credit to Hammer. "She's a natural." Given NBC Universal's—and, for that matter, GE's—overall financial picture, Hammer's bosses are counting on her ability to keep the black ink flowing.

In television, achievements like this can be fleeting. The process of greenlighting TV shows is extraordinarily subjective; often the genius who champions a hot show like ABC's Private Practice is the same person who subsequently greenlights dreck like The Unusuals on the same network. But Hammer, 58, is working to change that law of averages by systematizing the way her team looks at potential shows, by moving beyond the "golden gut" decision making that drives Hollywood to rely instead on formal checklists and scorecards. Today when considering scripts, Hammer and her team ask a routinized series of questions: Does the show have a fun sensibility? Does it have a "blue sky" tone of hopefulness? Does it revolve around an "aspirational," if quirky, lead character with a moral and ethical center? Potential shows are scored based on how closely they match these dictates; only high scorers make it on air. Before Hammer's arrival, USA was the television equivalent of a potluck supper, a hodgepodge of reruns and castoffs. Driven by her unique show-selection technique—a process she refers to as the "brand filter"—USA has been transformed into a cohesive collection of character-driven shows that are resonating with viewers, and advertisers are in hot pursuit. "The goal was to take a large, broad-based network and make it an exclusive club by creating connective tissue," Hammer says, describing the bond between characters on the screen and an audience of individual characters watching at home. The USA tag line describes its strategy: "Characters Welcome."

Hammer's approach also relies on a culture shift within USA. She is insisting that her top executives—including those in the marketing and promotion departments—not just have a vote in selecting shows, but also a voice in each other's plans for molding, rolling out, and supporting them. She calls it breaking down the "silos" that widely exist in Hollywood's TV-show factories and lead to inconsistencies in the look and feel of network brands. "Bonnie's management style is inclusiveness," says Jeff Wachtel, the network's top Hollywood exec, who concedes he'd wondered at first, "Why are all these people in my business?" But he's a believer now.

USA Network's roots lie in the earliest days of modern cable programming. Launched in 1980 under the joint ownership of Hollywood powerhouses Paramount and MCA, it had evolved out of a tiny startup channel initially housed in a Citizens First bank building in Glen Rock, N.J. The network's name was a reflection of its strategy: to take advantage of the innovation of satellite delivery to offer a national channel to local cable broadcasters. Over the next two decades, USA Network became a chess piece in the consolidation and empire building that's driven the entertainment industry, at times changing hands as readily as some TV viewers surf channels. Over the years it was owned by Matsushita, France's Vivendi, the Seagram heir Edgar Bronfman Jr., and Barry Diller. Its programming, meanwhile, was a grab bag of sports (like U.S. Open tennis), children's shows, box-office movies, and reruns of TV shows like Walker, Texas Ranger; Murder, She Wrote; and Miami Vice. While most of the cable dial evolved to offer channels with clearly defined niche -audiences—think ESPN, MTV, CNN, -Lifetime—USA was left competing with TBS and TNT, which were also aimed at mass audiences and whose schedules always seemed to be a mishmash.

Hammer attended Boston University and worked briefly as a photographer before falling into her television career. Her first TV job, in 1974, was at the Boston PBS station WGBH on a children's show called Infinity Factory, where her duties involved scooping up excrement from one of the show's costars, a sheepdog. By 1987 she'd moved on to Lifetime, where she developed award-winning documentaries about subjects like gang recruitment. In this era, when the big broadcast networks still reigned supreme, much of the industry looked down on cable as its minor-league sibling, but Hammer recalls immediately recognizing that view as shortsighted. "There were no rules in cable—it was a group of us kids playing in a sandbox making different sand castles," she says. In cable, she also learned how to do good work with tight budgets. "We could reach a level of quality without being extravagant," she says.

In 1989 Hammer jumped to USA Network as a programming executive. Among other assignments, she inherited oversight of World Wrestling Entertainment, a pillar of USA's programming. Televised wrestling dates back to the earliest days of the medium in the late 1940s, and USA's Monday Night Raw, with its mix of scripted faux drama, acrobatic athleticism, and over-the-top shtik, is the longest-running prime-time cable program in history. Unlike the network's boss at the time, Hammer fashioned a warm working relationship with WWE owner Vince McMahon. She also approached the wrestling franchise like any other show, offering notes on how to improve plotlines and story arcs. Hammer even persuaded McMahon to hire soap-opera and comedy writers, and used cross-promotion by casting wrestlers in USA shows. She arbitrated some of WWE's less tasteful tendencies: for one live episode, in which one wrestler used a machete to attempt to castrate an opponent, Hammer stayed on the phone with the cameraman while watching from home, instructing him on precisely when to pull the camera away. WWE's ratings, already high, soared further, helping push USA toward the top of the cable rankings.