Television: Squawking With the Animals

The news is not good. It is ovarian cancer, and it is inoperable. Listening to the sympathetic doctor, the woman who brought her stricken friend here now has a job to do: explain death to her own daughter. She goes into the lobby and finds the girl. And...sniff...excuse me...

A show that can get you to cry over a spiny hedgehog without feeling entirely ridiculous is doing something right. It's just this understanding of the connection between people and animals that has made Emergency Vets and the rest of the addictive fare on Animal Planet into a cable success story. In just over four years, the network, a spin-off of the Discovery Channel, has become available in 66 million homes; it's opening a stage show at Universal Studios this spring and sells a line of toys; and, analyst Derek Baine of Paul Kagan Associates estimates, it had revenue of more than $100 million last year.

The secret: an unashamed sense of show biz. Says A.P.'s executive vice president/general manager, W. Clark Bunting: "We're not just a 1500-mm camera talking about the alpha male and the alpha female." Animal Planet combines a sense of humor and emotion with an irreverent brand of extreme naturalism that crosses the WWF (World Wildlife Fund) with the WWF (World Wrestling Federation). There's Ian ("Shark") Gordon, who gets jaw-snappingly close to great whites. There's Jeff Corwin, who, facing angry elephants in Borneo, explains the need to stand still: "What you do privately in your underpants is your business. You don't run away."

Then there's breakout star Steve Irwin of The Crocodile Hunter, who captures everything delightful and dodgy about Animal Planet. A personable Australian with Barney Rubble-esque good looks, Irwin trots the globe to wrestle crocs and dangle poisonous snakes by the tail, evading bite after bite, narrating breathlessly and popeyed as if reading a scary story to a three-year-old. ("G'day, and welcome to the Dah-h-hk Continent!") His antics give kids--an A.P. target audience--an educational alternative to Dragon Ball Z, and he offers a conservationist message. But his show's lessons are pretty basic--essentially, "Animals can kill you"--interspersed with such arcana as the fact that chameleons change their color. (They're chameleon-like!)