Foxy Business News

"Happy Hour" isn't your usual cable business-news show. Host Cody Willard is a 35-year-old former hedge-fund manager who's hipster handsome, with shoulder-length hair parted down the middle. Anchoring the 5 p.m. show from a stool at the Bull and Bear bar inside Manhattan's Waldorf-Astoria hotel, Willard is casually imprecise as he discusses the numbers. But you kind of get the general idea anyway. His costar, Rebecca Gomez, perches perkily next to him, as flirty camera angles and naughty hemlines threaten to spill her Victoria's Secrets. On one recent episode, the conversation turns to a hot new business, a kind of endowment fund for women that gets its money from men. The name: myfreeimplants.com.

Seriously, this is serious business. "Happy Hour" may look like a razor-sharp parody of cable business news. In fact, it is from media mogul Rupert Murdoch and his revolutionary lieutenant, Roger Ailes. These are the same folks who brought you the Fox News Channel, which dethroned CNN as the No. 1 news outlet. Now, their Fox Business Network, launched last week, is challenging cable business-news leader CNBC to a barroom brawl.

"Happy Hour," which runs opposite CNBC's "Fast Money" show, is the most naked example of Murdoch's strategy. It's aimed at expanding viewership for business news to people whom you might sit next to in a Main Street pub, a world away from CNBC's audience of Wall Street pros, CEOs and wealth junkies. "It's something that the average viewer who's not a big-time trader would be able to enjoy," says Andrew Donchin, director of national broadcast for ad agency Carat.

Yes, CNBC has the hyperventilating Jim Cramer, star of "Mad Money." But "Happy Hour's" Willard is so hopped up on adrenaline that he ends one episode with a leap over his bar stool. While CNBC's "Money Honey," Maria Bartiromo, drips Manhattan sophistication, Gomez is the steamiest anchor this side of Mirthala Salinas, the now ex-Telemundo star who's made headlines for having an affair with her primary news subject, the married mayor of Los Angeles. Just three days into "Happy Hour," Gomez was mulling a name change for it: "Super GoGo (Gomez) and Doofus Boy," she tells NEWSWEEK.

FBN is hardly ashamed of the network's emphasis on eye candy as a competitive tool. "Television is a visual media and you want to watch people pleasing to the eye," says Terry Baker, executive producer of the network's prime-time lineup.

He and the rest of Murdoch's troops are betting "Happy Hour" will help FBN with viewers and the cable operators who can expand FBN's reach, which at 30 million homes is roughly a third of CNBC's 95 million. "We recognize that business doesn't only exist on Wall Street," says Baker. CNBC acknowledges the competing world views. "We're in different businesses," says Mark Hoffman, its president. "We're not obsessed with trying to recruit everybody."