You cannot possibly have missed the relentless ads for CNN's October "Planet in Peril" documentary, a four-hour eco-soap starring Anderson Cooper, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, and (of course!) Animal Planet's Jeff Corwin, the impoverished man's Steve Irwin. The "CNN Worldwide Investigation" (oooh...heavy) took a year to complete, cost the network some serious change, and was hailed as its first high-definition documentary, following the fall launch of CNN-HD. Too bad that sister-company Time Warner neglected to get with the freaking program already—the largest cable provider in New York and LA still doesn't carry CNN in high-definition.

Tough to imagine how no one in the Columbus Circle building, where both Time Warner Inc. and the Anderson Coooper 360 studios are housed, managed to anticipate that one! It probably didn't help much that Time Warner bent over for Fox Business Channel, launching the barely two-week-old fledgling network in both standard and high-definition formats.
Meanwhile, CNN's been filming in HD for just over two months without a leg-up from its parent company. DirecTV carries CNN-HD, though the provider apparently wasn't ready for the network's September launch.

But enough business talk—clearly the one good thing to come out of CNN-HD is the crystal-clear focus through which you can see Corwin's and Cooper's man-love emerge. (Also, Anderson's work with his trainer is paying off!) The trunk-caressing! The water-frolicking! The fervent snake-wrangling! The co-parenting and bottle-feeding! Phew. Cigarette, anyone?

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