Dave makes nice with lions this time

In the Discovery Channel documentary “Into the Lion’s Den,” premiering Sunday night, animal handler Dave Salmoni goes out into the semi-wilds of a private game reserve in South Africa to chill with the King of Beasts, to see how close he can get to them, and for how long, without getting eaten. The producers impose a frustratingly commonplace idea of what constitutes “drama” onto footage whose prime quality is one of near-mystical stillness, but ultimately the pictures win out.

Salmoni, we are told, is “pioneering new methods to approach wild lions unarmed and on foot,” the practical value of which seems as good as nil, really, unless the lions get out one day and find you without your whip or bicycle. Notwithstanding the pointed use of the words “experiment” and “project” and “zoologist” to legitimize the enterprise, the whole business at times seems more stunt than science, a lion tamer’s gambit rather than a researcher’s. The real question here may have been what to do with the telegenic Salmoni after “Living With Tigers,” an earlier, controversial Discovery documentary about training animals raised in captivity to get along in the wild.

Salmoni, who can seem a little obnoxious when dealing with mere humans, clearly loves the big cats. Here he wants to prove that lions are “more wired to accept humans than attack them,” though since he never acts like an ordinary person around them, this point is moot. Over the course of months, boiled down here into minutes, he draws incrementally closer, cultivating an atmosphere in which he will be both noticed and ignored, cooing “Biiiiig lions, biiiig lions” over and over, with an occasional “Hi, buddy” or “Hi, sweetie” or animal baby talk you would speak to any house cat.

Ultimately he lies down near them -- “with them” would overstate the case, though the long lens of the camera pushes them into the same plane -- in an atmosphere of mutual respect dictated entirely by the lions’ ability to run him down and gobble him up faster than you can say “Two all beef patties special sauce lettuce cheese pickles onions on a sesame seed bun.” They don’t eat him, or bother much with him. (They do eat other things, sensitive souls be warned -- you will know when to look away.) This is not “When Animals Attack,” so much as it is “When Animals Mostly Lie Around Under the Trees and Occasionally Shift Position or Stretch or Yawn or Nuzzle One Another Adorably,” which for some of us is a perfectly acceptable premise.

What makes “Into the Lion’s Den” most valuable are those moments of stillness, the way the camera catches the timeless time of the natural world, and suggests, in a handful of artfully framed images, something deep about the space we share, men and cats and everything else.

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Where: Discovery Channel

When: 10 to 11 p.m. Sunday

Ratings: TV-PG (may be unsuitable for young children)

Dave Salmoni...Host

Executive producer Oloff Bergh. Executive producer, Discovery Channel, Mick Kaczorowski.