INTERVIEW: Mark Steines hosts new Nat Geo WILD series, ‘Animal ER Live’

Photo: Several veterinary hospitals and facilities will be profiled on the new Nat Geo WILD series Animal ER Live. Photo courtesy of Nat Geo WILD / Provided with permission.

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Nat Geo WILD is set to premiere Animal ER Live Saturday, March 30 at 9 p.m. On the new reality series, cameras follow the adventures at several veterinary hospitals across the United States. At the same time, host Mark Steines and experts Dr. Justine Lee and Dr. Will Draper provide commentary on these pet emergencies.

Steines is a veteran of TV hosting, having been the voice of Entertainment Tonight and Hallmark Channel’s Home & Family for years. For this TV project, he truly has no idea what to expect, and that’s the fun of the series.

“I would like to be able to say exactly what you’re going to get, but nobody knows that because it’s unscripted,” Steines said in a recent phone interview. “Everything that happens is totally live. Seven cameras going into some of the top, well-respected animal clinics and hospitals around the country, dealing with everything from cats and dogs to horses to exotics. We have no idea at any given moment what’s going to come through that door.”

The team chose facilities that have a lot of traffic, especially on the weekends in the primetime when pets need assistance. One of the facilities, for example, is Angell Animal Medical Center in Boston, and Steines predicted that they see an average of 70 to 100 patients per weekend.

“We know the volume is there,” he said. “The time of day that we’ll be doing this is likely meaning we’re dealing with urgent care because people don’t choose a 9 to 11 o’clock hour to casually take their animal to the vet, so we do anticipate that we’re going to be seeing some urgent patients needing urgent care. But again let me step back for a second and say that’s really not the goal of the show. I mean, we’re not here to show the sad and depressing stories. We really want to shine a light on those veterinarians that have dedicated and committed their life so much that they’ve given up weekends. They have studied. They’re there to take care of what we consider, many of us who own pets, family members. When they need help, you want to know that there’s somebody out there all hours of the night that will help you in your hour of need, and that’s what we’re going to see.”

Steines’ TV career has been centered on preparation, whether he was standing on a red carpet at the Academy Awards or helping home owners with improvements to their houses. Animal ER Live has sent him a curveball, and he admittedly needs to “fly by the seat of his pants” for the next four weekends.

“I was standing on a red carpet at the Academy Awards,” he said. “I had to know who was coming down that carpet, what were they nominated for, how many times were they nominated, what’s their speech going to be. I had all these questions ready to go. Here there’s zero preparation, other than knowing the facilities and spending time getting to know Dr. Justine Lee and Dr. Will Draper, who are going to be the experts and knowing their background and what they specialize in. Other than that, it is literally hanging on by the seat of my pants while we watch it go from one to the other.”

There have been a few rehearsals, so the team can understand the rhythm of moving from one facility to another. In those sessions, Steines was surprised to see a duck that may have been mauled in Oregon and a dog that swallowed its owner’s underwear, requiring emergency surgery.

“You just have no idea what you’re going to be faced with,” Steines said. “At any given moment, there’s the cutest thing in the world that comes to the door, a seven-week-old puppy that is in for a wellness check, and then there’s one that needs to have a very delicate heart surgery. It is a combination of really heartwarming and inspirational stories, and for me … I just want to be accessible on all fronts, to be able to have empathy and really connect to the owners of those animals. Because as a pet owner myself, we know one day perhaps we could be in that position. We want to know when veterinarians have to communicate with the owners of these patients it is done with great care, and that to me is all I can do to prepare, to be an open vessel to what’s happening on screen, and try to direct the audience and remind everybody what we just saw, what we’re going to see and where we’re going.”

Steines has loved pets his entire life. He counts himself more as a dog person, and currently his family has two dogs in their home. He was excited to share their stories and how they actually connect to his time on television.

“Currently I have a golden retriever,” he said. “His name is Fred, and Fred was adopted. He has a little bit of a backstory. He was a dog in the Disney movie Spooky Buddies, and when I worked at Entertainment Tonight I had an opportunity. We had lost our German shepherd a couple years before. My kids were too young to really appreciate Alex because Alex in those years her quality of life had diminished so much they just didn’t have the connection to her. So we did get Fred. He was adopted. We went to the set and were able to pick him from the cast. He’s just adorable. He’s been with us since they were so young.”

The other pet he identified as his wife’s dog, Norbert. And this little social media star is actually the reason he met his wife in the first place.

“Norbert is responsible for our meeting,” he said with a laugh. “I met my wife, Julie, on the show Home & Family when I was hosting it, and she came on to promote the books that they wrote based on Norbert. Norbert is a 3-pound therapy dog with about 2 million followers on social media, and Julie does a tremendous amount of work, along with her mom, in educating people about therapy animals, but also spending countless hours at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. They would go to a lot of retirement homes when she was living back in Boston. They wrote books about it, and when she came on the show with him, he was so cute. I just said to him, ‘Norbert, you’re a perfect wing man.’ And when she heard that, she went, ‘Wait a minute, he’s single.’ And she sent me an email and asked me out to dinner, and now we’re married.”

He added: “And we have a brand-new baby daughter all because of little Norbert. … I’m a dog person. Not that I don’t like cats. I had cats earlier in my life, but I’m really more of a dog person.”

By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com

Animal ER Live will premiere Saturday, March 30 at 9 p.m. on Nat Geo WILD. Click here for more information.