Animal Planet: Where the Wild Things Are

When the American Academy of Pediatrics dropped its little anti-television bombshell earlier this year (“No TV for Kids Under Two” roared the headlines), my husband and I paused, but we did not falter. “Danny Mac,” we say when asked, “only watches Animal Planet.”

Unintentionally, this observation carries a Buckley-esque self-consciousness that often accompanies the statement, “Well, yes, we have a TV, but we really only watch PBS,” but in this case, it’s actually true.

Oh sure, there are occasional forays into the wildlife programming on the Discovery Channel, but that demographic is different--the grizzlies, cheetahs and lionesses often actually catch the deer/gazelle and the subsequent close-ups of viscera and bloody muzzles put too much pressure on a mom’s capacity to spin. On Animal Planet, geared specifically toward a family audience, any necessary food-chain activity takes place either off-screen or at a distance in the tall, tall grass.

We are not alone. A spinoff of the Discovery Channel, Animal Planet is, at the venerable age of 4, the fastest-growing cable network in the country, bringing the four- (and six-) legged denizens of the seven continents into 50 million homes a day.

All animals, all the time is, in fact, its motto, requiring what is perhaps the oddest assortment of programming known to cable. Certainly there are shows one could consider traditional--dog shows, serial wildlife documentaries--but there’s also “The Aquanauts” (“Baywatch” meets Jacques Cousteau), “Animal X” (the odd, the rare, the stuff of legends,) “Animal Legends,” “Animal Court” (Judge Wapner presiding) and “The Planet’s Funniest Animals” (a cross-genus American’s Funniest Videos).

The jewels in the Animal Planet crown, however, the shows that turn viewers from the mildly amused into the slavishly devoted are “Emergency Vets” and “Crocodile Hunter.” “Emergency Vets,” Animal Planet’s first effort at original programming, has for more than three years and 100 episodes chronicled the daily drama of an emergency veterinary clinic in Denver. With its “ER”-like opening sequence, fast pace and heart-tugging story lines (who can turn away from a liquid-eyed golden retriever struggling to walk again?), the show has created a team of unlikely celebrities--”Emergency Vet” intern Steven Petersen was named People magazine’s “Sexiest Animal Lover” last year.

But Australian herpatologist and genuine crazy man Steve Irwin and his stalwart wife, Terri, stars of “Crocodile Hunter,” remain king and queen of Animal Planet. What began as a series of home videos documenting the exploits of Irwin wrastlin’ crocs at his Queensland wildlife park have become a series of worldwide adventures as the couple travels the globe in search of dangerous, and endangered, species.

Steve’s pop-eyed enthusiasm and native expletives (“Crikey! Isn’t she a little beyoouuty?”) have just recently pushed him into the realm of pop culture icon. The Internet roils with rumors of his demise at the fangs of some heinous reptile, he’s been spoofed on “Saturday Night Live” and “South Park,” Schwarzenegger and the Dixie Chicks have requested personal audiences, and he and Terri have had to hire a support team simply to answer the hundreds of e-mails they receive daily.

“Steve is our first home-grown celebrity,” says Clark Bunting, senior vice president and general manager of Animal Planet. “Now when we bring him over here, we need security at the airports. He gets overwhelmed by fans.”

Shows Creating New Celebrities

This season may well create a whole new cast of local heroes: “The Keepers,” which debuted in January, is a behind-the-scenes look at the San Diego Wild Animal Park--watching them prepare meals for the park’s hundreds of various carnivores is a lesson in itself. Who knew you could buy jumbo sacks of frozen rats?

“The folks at Animal Planet warned us that we might have some new celebrities on our hands,” says Ted Molter, head of marketing for San Diego Zoo and Animal Park. “And the response so far has been very good. So we’ve done some media training with our staff.”

Not a usual part of a veterinarian’s job description.

Also new are “You Lie Like a Dog,” a what’s-my-line type game show for pet owners and animal professionals, and “Call of the Wild,” the channel’s foray into original fictitious drama.

This last recently brought Bunting and some of his staff out from their Bethesda, Md., headquarters to the Ritz-Carlton Huntington in Pasadena for the semiannual television critics tour, where they presented the cast of “Call of the Wild,” including Kavic, the Malamute mix from Vancouver who will star as Buck. The Ritz graciously made an exception to its no-pets policy; things could have been so much worse, after all--last year, an alligator, a boa constrictor and a Gila monster made themselves comfortable among the mirrors and gilt.

“They were very grateful it was just a dog,” says Matt Katzive, director of publicity for Animal Planet. “None of those messy insurance forms to fill out.”

The network has managed to grow despite its seeming refusal to get with the postmodern program--nothing could be further from the currently requisite special-effects-driven big-star vehicle than a documentary about termites. But then you have to consider the demographics. Animal Planet was created by a parent for parents seeking something substantial without the random mayhem and partial nudity of most adult fare or the manic noise and spastic movement that colors much of “children’s” TV.

“Four or five years ago, we were looking at how to position ourselves in the coming digital services,” says Bunting, then a senior vice president at Discovery. “One idea was a natural history program. At the time my kids were 6 and 4, and there was not a lot of programming that I felt comfortable watching with them. I thought, I’m in the target demo, I’ll just program it for me.”

Starting Small Leads to Bigger Plans

Bunting started small--the original business plan had Animal Planet reaching 20 million homes by 2003--using mostly library material from Discovery. That includes some wildlife documentaries and a lot of classic animal shows including “Lassie,” “Flipper” and “Gentle Ben,” shows that now appear in the wee hours of the morning, East and West Coast time.

“I figured I could just repackage these shows, have some fun with them, but it didn’t really work,” Bunting says now. “The local stations were calling me saying, ‘This is all well and good, but you have to invest in original programming.’ ”

Sticking to his original family-viewing premise, Bunting rejected the typical “Wild Kingdom” model, mainly because so much of it was violent. “I wanted natural history, but not a show that would force you to explain the brutality of nature to your terrified kids.”

He also wanted characters, people who would provide a sense of relationship to the animals and continuity for the viewers. He came up with the idea of following a veterinary practice--what would eventually become “Emergency Vets”--but even that had obstacles at first. He called Jim Gerber, executive producer with Rocket Pictures, who jumped on the idea. “We followed a country vet, which I thought would be great. But the first episode had him performing a caesarean section on a cow. Unbelievable. I mean, he slices this cow and sticks his arm in and there’s all this blood and we’re sitting there in the Discovery offices watching this tape and I said, ‘Oh, Jim, oh man, this is not it.’ ”

A few weeks later, as deadlines loomed, Gerber came up with the Denver veterinary, which proved to be a success surpassing even Bunting’s expectations. “If you had said to me three years ago, ‘Can you get 100 episodes out of this?’ I would have said no. But people really respond to the show--everyone with a pet understands how traumatic rushing to the vets can be,” says Bunting, who has two cats.

While “Emergency Vets” was gestating, Bunting and his staff were flipping through some of the documentary series Discovery had in the can. It certainly doesn’t hurt that Discovery has a longtime relationship with the BBC; in the United Kingdom, “social docs”--documentaries that follow a subject or subjects for multiple episodes--are wildly popular. “Big Cat Diary” came from the BBC, as did “Great African Wildlife Rescues” and “Vets in the Wild,” which is merely the African portion of an ongoing series following young veterinarian Trude Mostue from her days in veterinarian school through, it would seem, perpetuity.

Croc Hunter Is for Real--and More

During their search, they also turned up the Irwin tapes, a few of which had appeared on Discovery. Bunting saw in them the seeds of an empire.

“I thought if this guy is for real, and I wasn’t at all sure he was, then there is definitely something there,” he says. So off he flew to meet the Croc Hunter, the first of a series of meetings that Bunting’s wife calls his “annual near-death experience.”

Irwin, he discovered, was realer than real and during the next three years the Croc Hunter became Animal Planet’s centerpiece, expanding its purview from reptiles Down Under to multiple species--Tasmanian devils, orangutans, sea turtles, cave worms. Crocs and snakes are still the critters of choice, but the Irwins are staunch, and democratic, conservationists, traveling the world to explain the habits and often precarious plight of many species. They also have a lot of episodes (40 thus far) to fill, and as Bunting says, “there’s only so much you can do in Australia.”

To ensure that Animal Planet doesn’t air any show that might be considered detrimental to animals in any way, Bunting and his staff keep in constant contact with a wide variety of animal experts--from the Humane Society to the World Wildlife Fund to some of the countries’ more illustrious zoos.

In fact, since the beginning, Bunting and Gerber wanted to do a series that went behind the scenes at a zoo. Then last year the San Diego Wild Animal Park agreed to let a film crew follow some of its staff around as it tended the park’s 3,200 animals, which became the foundation for “The Keepers.” Animals whose needs go way beyond feeding--one recent episode traveled the frozen depths of one of the world’s largest zoological sperm banks and dealt with the issue of animal birth control; another followed an ophthalmologist on his rounds.

“It’s a great educational tool for students and kids,” Molter says. “Everything takes place out in the open, so people can see what really happens.”

The cable channel is also introducing original dramas this year--both movies and series. “Call of the Wild” was its first, premiering with a two-hour movie at the end of March, followed by 13 hourlong episodes that air weekly. Also in production is “The Trial of Old Drum,” a true story about a dog accused of a crime he didn’t commit.

“And we’d love to be able to premiere big-screen movies, like ‘Babe,’ ” Bunting says.

Because it all comes down to the animals.

“There are cycles in TV,” Bunting says. “The baby boomers were raised on ‘Flipper’ and ‘Gentle Ben’--more people became marine biologists because of Flipper than Jacques Cousteau. The boomers have a real consciousness of conservation, and that is what a lot of our shows are about. Bringing endangered species into your home. People love animals. It’s genetic. And besides,” he adds, “we’re having a great time.