Jonathan Storm | Into the wild, with beasts, kids

"The coast is clear," Katie assures her little stepsister, who has a bathroom emergency behind a rock as their family takes a rest stop.

But it's not! Oh, no! Here comes - an elephant!

Routine stuff, on Life Is Wild, premiering at 8 tonight on CW57, which is not at all routine as far as American family TV shows go. It's filmed almost entirely in South Africa, in tandem with an already successful British show. The fathers in both shows are veterinarians, and animals from lizards to giraffes pitch in as costars.

Wild at Heart, a popular Sunday-night show on Britain's commercial ITV network that premiered last year, focuses on newlyweds who move with their children from Bristol, England, to the bush as a way to divert a rebellious teenage daughter and just generally get the new step-siblings to feel the love. It picked up Hayley Mills this year. She plays Grandma, and, my, doesn't time fly?

The CW hopes Life Is Wild will become a popular Sunday-night American show. Our heroes move from Manhattan, and it's the teenage son who's the big problem this time. No grandma, but Grandpop lives in the broken-down Blue Antelope Game Lodge, where he drinks the days away, as the new arrivals try to polish things up and maybe even entice a few guests to come visit.

Both shows are filmed not much more than an hour from Johannesburg, less from mega-resort Sun City, using basically the same sets and crews, even some of the same local extras, but the actors are different.

Instead of Hayley Mills, we Yanks get TV- and feature-film journeyman D.W. Moffett as Danny, the vet; Stephanie Niznick (Dr. Brown's pretty neighbor on Everwood) as Jo, the stepmom, and a bunch of young actors as the kids, aged 7 to 18, that the youngsters in the viewing audience are supposed to fall in love with.

No mall tours for these guys, though, at least not until summer. It's a long plane ride back to America from South Africa.

The action may not be far from the casinos and the big city, but you'd never know it from the exotic locale that includes scenes from a nearby teeming and ramshackle African community. While lamenting the immediate availability of the Internet and decent skateboarding parks, our young transplants will interact - a little bit, at least - with the locals, as well as with the few black South African actors in the show.

Besides animal lovers (the show does have a bit of a Lassie feel), The CW hopes viewers missing the family values of long-running 7th Heaven will glom onto Life Is Wild. One British reviewer cautioned families that a lot of people carry guns and some of our furry friends do get zapped with tranquilizer darts, but that's all probably a tad less traumatic over here in the land of the Second Amendment.

Teenage girls should get their little hearts aflutter over the washboard revealed when troubled Jesse (25-year-old ex-General Hospital heartthrob Andrew St. John) rips off his shirt to lie next to the pool at the fancy resort that's a stone's throw from the Blue Antelope. And the boys will pray that some sort of relationship develops with the luscious Brit in the bikini who's the daughter of the resort owner.

But other than that, and the wild animals, of course, the proceedings are pretty predictable and tame.

Jesse hates his stepdad. Katie (19-year-old Leah Pipes), too responsible to be a teen since her dear old mama died, needs to learn to lighten up, and the little kids, Chase and Mia, will have their share of adventures, too.

In the pilot, Chase tries to reunite an orphaned lion cub with its mother. Instead, the lioness considers having him for dinner. Mia can't deal with all the nighttime howling as she tries to go to sleep.

"How do you know they're not bears or tigers or monsters?" she pleads to her stepsister.

"Because there are no bears or tigers in Africa," she soothes.

"You didn't say anything about monsters!"

There will be no monster ratings coming from Africa and Life Is Wild, serenely benign considering its title, but some families should find fun in this foolishness from far away.

TV Review

Life Is Wild

Debuts at 8 tonight on CW57.