The New TV Season : CBS’ Animal Park : Network Spends Millions of Dollars on a Zoo for Lindsay Wagner’s ‘Peaceable Kingdom’

In the last decade, American zoos have spent more than $1 billion to create jungles, rain forests and mountain highlands that closely resemble the natural habitats of their captive animals. Junking the bars and padlocks in favor of these elaborate constructions certainly provides a more humane environment for the animals, but an equally important motivation lies in luring humans to this cage-less menagerie. Once they are sufficiently awed and delighted by the gorillas and sun bears in their authentic digs, current zoo theory goes, the humans will then lend their enthusiasm and their pocketbooks to the real work of today’s zoo--a crusade to save thousands of species from extinction.

In similar fashion, CBS has spent millions on its own zoo, a new series called “Peaceable Kingdom,” in the hope of luring humans back to the network with a big-name star and lots of furry creatures. And while several zoo directors who have seen the show are thrilled by its potential to bolster their own efforts, they say the program’s challenge will be to satisfy the dramatic requirements of the TV ratings game without exploiting the image of the very animals that zoos are seeking to protect.

In “Peaceable Kingdom,” Lindsay Wagner, once “The Bionic Woman” and currently Ford’s best pitchwoman, returns to series television as Rebecca Cafferty, a widowed mother of three and the director of a big-city zoo, who lives with her family and their pet sea lion on the zoo grounds. “The Dukes of Hazzard’s “ Tom Wopat plays her brother, the zoo’s lion-hearted curator.

Mark Waxman, the show’s executive producer, said that the series will focus primarily on this family, with the zoo serving as a backdrop for their personal stories much in the same way a hospital or police station provides a context for the personal lives of characters on other shows.

“It won’t be wall-to-wall walrus,” Waxman said. And to be sure, the camera does gravitate to Wagner’s well-known, pretty face more than to those of the anonymous gorillas, kangaroos and endangered snow leopards. But if the first episode is any indication, “Peaceable Kingdom” is as much about the zoo as it is about such human dramas as the adolescent daughter’s troubles with algebra.

The main story in the opening episode, which airs next Wednesday at 8 p.m., concerns the construction of one of those natural habitats for the fictional zoo’s gorillas and Rebecca’s desperate attempts to finagle funding and favors from city officials. The episode also touches on the problems of keeping animals in captivity, the escape and death of a lion, captivity breeding programs for endangered species, the zoo workers’ absolute devotion to their non-human charges and the madcap escapades of Rover the pet sea lion.

Waxman, who before the show had only a passing interest in zoos or animals--”I had a goldfish once,” he said, “and it died”--added that future episodes would revolve around breeding programs for endangered animals, artificial insemination, holistic medical care for animals, the destruction of the environment, ocean pollution and what to do with a zoo full of bison when there isn’t enough land to keep them.

“To the extent that it’s interesting, we will offer a behind-the-scenes look at the business of running a zoo,” Waxman said. “It’s a huge hotel/hospital. They give birth there. They feed them and they give them a burial. And in between, a lot of dramatic, crazy things happen. The animals get sick. They get stolen. They get traded. They get lost. There is a never-ending supply of stories.”

“This melding of reality with Hollywood has transitioned into something that is pretty worthwhile,” said Dr. Warren Thomas, the director of the Los Angeles Zoo for the past 16 years and the show’s professional consultant. “It gives you a look inside of zoos and it gives a strong message of conservation and the value of nature and wildlife.”

As an example, Thomas pointed to an upcoming episode about endangered species that explains the justification for taking animals out of the wild and harboring them in zoos. “A vehicle like this can go a long way to implanting in the public mind that zoos are often the last resort for these animals,” Thomas said, “that if it wasn’t for zoos these animals would be wiped off the face of the Earth.”

But Thomas and other zoo professionals object to many of the portrayals of animals and zoo life in the opening episode, especially the keeping of a sea lion as a pet inside the family home.

“No zoo director would keep a sea lion as a pet,” said Claudia Collier, director of the Santa Ana zoo. “It is improper.”

“And at one point they put a bow tie on the sea lion and that was particularly offensive to me,” said Karen Sausman, director of the Living Desert in Palm Desert. “Then she (Wagner) refers to it as a seal and it is a sea lion, and as zoo director I’d like to hope that she knows the difference.”

“I’ve told them repeatedly to get rid of that sea lion,” Thomas said. “But that’s Hollywood.”

The zoo directors also criticized a scene in which Wagner’s character hides a small monkey in her purse and then takes it out in a restaurant as part of her ambushing of the bureaucrat who controls the city’s purse strings.

“It creates a bad image about what you can do with these animals,” Sausman said. “Zoo directors do not use their cuddly critters as levers to get what they want from people.”

Waxman said that the show continues to depend heavily on Thomas to maintain the integrity of the zoo setting and that the producers try to incorporate his suggestions. But in some instances, he conceded, they take dramatic license to make the show more entertaining. The pet sea lion and the monkey in the purse fall into this category, he said, calling the zoo professionals’ criticism a bit “finicky.”

(The show uses trained professional animals for all scenes that require hands-on contact with humans. Animals at the Los Angeles Zoo and San Diego Zoo are filmed in their habitats from outside their enclosures.)

But Waxman insisted that the series will never do anything that is “truly against zoo doctrine” and that the staff of the show is committed to helping portray zoos, animals and the necessity of working to preserve the environment in as positive a light as possible. Thomas confirmed that the series is improving every week in terms of its portrayal of the zoo and zoo issues.

All of the zoo directors interviewed agreed that “Peaceable Kingdom” can be a marvelous tool for educating the public about zoos and conservation as long as it is careful not to treat animals as props.

“I have great hope for the show in terms of showing the public that zoos are more than a pleasant place to take the kids,” Sausman said. “Zoos today are vitally necessary in preserving stocks of animals whose range in nature is disappearing. Zoos truly have become giant arks. I think that if they show the zoo for what it really is, this program can really help the public appreciate zoos for all the work that they do today.”