How To Survive Summer

By Joel Stein

Perhaps the only slogan more grating than NBC's arrogant "Must See TV" is NBC's patronizing "It's New to You." There was a very good reason why we missed Caroline's mother's visit to the city the first time around, thank you. So the cable channels, aware of the networks' prehistoric insistence on shutting down for the summer, use these months for their hype: HBO's Sex and the City (now), Showtime's Lolita (Aug. 2), the Discovery Channel's Shark Week (Aug. 9-16) and the Learning Channel's latest swimsuit documentary, Beauty and the Beach (July 11). The best viewing is hiding on obscure cable channels. Finding them can require not only keen summer-surfing skills but sometimes a DirecTV satellite. But hey, it's either that or spending another Monday night watching Caroline misplace a family heirloom, right after that visiting-mom episode. The choice is yours.

ANIMAL PLANET Unlike those PBS documentaries on cheetahs that high school kids have long enjoyed watching while stoned, the programming on this network is high concept. There is still, however, some gnarly stuff. Crocodile Hunter tracks the boyish-yet-bad-ass Steve Irwin and his wife through Australia, where they pick up snakes and outrun emus. Even those who don't like animals--in fact, especially those who dislike animals--can enjoy Emergency Vets, a cinema-verite take on a Denver veterinary office. Rover and his owner dealing with a run-over paw make great TV. And perhaps the network's cleverest idea of all is The Pet Shop, a talk show with pet jokes in the monologue, pet skits and celebrities who are interviewed with their pets. Animal Planet does feature too much new Lassie and Flipper, but the rest of the original programming demonstrates how broadly appealing a special-interest channel can be.

GAME SHOW NETWORK If this fin-de-siecle thing means anything, the game show will soon return in all its glory. And while we're rutted in the suburbanized '90s version of the genre--Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy!--this station reminds us of all that game shows can be. The original programming can be stunningly bad (in particular, avoid the "comedy" show Faux Pause), but the repeats are groovy. The best stuff, of course, comes from Chuck Barris. The Gong Show is topped only by the short-lived Three's a Crowd, "the game that determines who knows a husband best, his wife or his secretary." Match Game is always packed with bawdy jokes ("I said 'buns'!") and the best of those '70s stars who seemed to exist solely on game shows. Where have you gone Charles Nelson Reilly, Jo Anne Worley, Brett Somers, Nipsey Russell, Arte Johnson and Jamie Farr?

FOOD NETWORK Of the two greatest pleasures in life, food has translated far more poorly into television. Julia Child and that frugal guy were interesting, but in a raw-broccoli kind of way. This nearly five-year-old network makes food more approachable, appealing and sexy than it has been since Jack and Chrissy got into that pie fight on Three's Company. The channel's biggest star is New Orleans chef Emeril Lagasse, who drives his studio audience to squeals by overloading dishes with garlic, Tabasco and wine and simultaneously yelling "Bam!" The network's newest show lands Bobby Flay--a guy's guy of a chef--outdoors in the Hamptons (the Hamptons!) with an annoyingly coy female comic (female!) and a weekly guest. The first week's guest was Inside the NFL host Nick Buoniconti, which saved the waning testosterone level.

DISNEY CHANNEL Compared with its other millennium-ready operations, Disney's network is Frontierland. The programming is filled with middling cartoons, Disney movies and, for no apparent reason, daily back-to-back repeats of Growing Pains. But the whole Mickey Rooney "Let's put on a network" concept pays off in Bug Juice. It's a Real World treatment of 12-to-15-year-olds away at camp. Whereas MTV's show gets mired in the inconsequential whining of twentysomethings ("I can't believe you just stuck your finger in the peanut butter, dude!"), the torture of a 13-year-old boy worried about his first kiss is piercing. Whether parents would sign TV release forms for this show is unclear (the girl who gets so homesick she wails like a coyote is going to have major therapy bills), but it's the best show about preteen angst since The Wonder Years.

THE TRAVEL CHANNEL It is television's responsibility to give us the world without forcing us to interact with it. While the Travel Channel occasionally makes you want to book a flight, it usually cures your wanderlust safely. Lonely Planet, when hosted by energetic Brit Ian Wright, gives you the parts of the world you'd never see even if you decided to use your vacation time to go to Greenland and Ethiopia. Wright will eat anything, climb anything and bother anyone in the cheeriest way possible. Almost as good is Adventure Bound, where insane Australian former bricklayer Alby Mangels delights in endangering his life in creative ways, like filming the marijuana plantations of Caribbean drug lords. It's as though Kramer never left.