TV: Inside our Bodies

We are a nation obsessed with our innards. Every week, hits like House and CSI invite us into a stranger's body, where we squirm and gag, all while peeking through our fingers to see more.
Now, Inside the Living Body (airing in September on the National Geographic Channel) suctions out all that superfluous plot nonsense for what can be best described as organ porn.

The two-hour documentary delivers one hi-def shot after another of, say, (A) a cold beer flowing down a man's gullet, (B) the neural network of the brain, (C) a boy's larynx stretching open during puberty, and (D) a teenager's muscle and bone growth spurt.

Of course, there's a lot of technology behind all that gore. The production crew, known for its 2005 series In the Womb, recruited more than 200 doctors, surgeons, and MRI techs as advisers and even as cinematographers to shoot some of the visceral video.

One team, for instance, used an HD endoscope to capture the first-ever footage of an egg erupting from an ovary. "It's an amazing difference in detail," fertility surgeon Steven Palter says. "It's like the audience has a magnifying glass." The producers also zoomed in on a new rendering plug-in called VoluMedic for LightWave 3D, the f/x software used in 300, Pan's Labyrinth, and X-Men 3: The Last Stand.

The application was used to overlay 3-D models of muscles, rib cages, and tendons taken from actual MRI scans onto the actors' torsos, necks, and limbs. Turns out, beauty is more than just skin deep.