Putting the Wild in Wildlife

Are nature shows becoming more competitive and more dangerous?

ByABC News
February 9, 2009, 11:30 AM

May 20, 2007 — -- There is, perhaps, only one way to adequately lay to rest a man known mostly for swimming with sharks and jumping from the tops of very high mountains.

And so, this Sunday, a team of high-flying paragliders will spread the ashes of adventurer and filmmaker Jimmy Hall who once told CNN, "I'd rather blow up than rust" over the blue waters of Hale'iwa, Hawaii.

Hall, 41, who had hosted some of Discovery Channel's Shark Week programs, died last week while BASE jumping think skydiving without the plane from a mountain on Baffin Island, a remote corner of the Canadian Arctic. He was filming a documentary there at the time.

"They all jumped at the same time and it's assumed that Jimmy got blown into the side of the mountain," a family spokesman told the media.

Viewers still enjoy the beauty and grandeur of Mother Nature. Some 5.1 million people tuned in to Discovery Channel's high-definition special, "Planet Earth," the highest ratings ever for a natural history program. But with the proliferation of cable channels, more and more stations feature personality-driven nature shows.

From Discovery and National Geographic to MTV, these shows feature the drama of men and women in the wild. Whether it is Discovery's reality show about climbers on Mt. Everest, "Everest: Beyond the Limit," or MTV's "Jackass" spin-off about wildlife, "WildBoyz," these programs play up the risk involved in making them.

So, just how did we get from the khaki-clad gentleman adventurers of "Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom" to MTV 2's WildBoyz, in which former "Jackass" cast member Steve-O pierced his cheek with a fish hook, loaded his underwear with chum and went swimming with sharks in the Gulf of Mexico?

For the MTV nature show, the "boyz," Steve-O (born Steven Glover) and Chris Pontius also dressed in banana suits in an effort to get chased by a group of endangered mountain gorillas, and, wearing nothing but thongs, covered themselves with poisonous lizards.