Travel Channel takes viewers to the beach

It’s the time of year when people are ready to shake off the cold.

“Everybody starts getting cabin fever,” says Ross Babit, senior vice president of programming at Travel Channel. “They get antsy and want to get back out to the warmer weather.”

But we still officially have another month of winter to endure.

Travel Channel’s solution, “Beach Week,” offers four days of sand and surf programming hosted by Sports Illustrated swimsuit model Nina Agdal. “It’s our way of letting viewers escape the cold and vicariously visit the beach for a few days,” Babit says.

“Beach Week” features five hours of new programming and kicks off 6 p.m. Sunday, with two more hours Monday through Wednesday, beginning at 7 p.m.

The marquee attraction of the lineup is the new Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition “Making Of” special, assuring that the magazine’s barely-covered bikini models will get even more media coverage. It’s the third year that Travel Channel and SI have teamed up on the annual “Making Of” special. In previous years, the show was just an hour. This time, they’ve expanded it to five one-hour episodes.

“SI’s Swimsuit Edition is one of the most iconic photo shoots in the world,” Babit says. “You’ve got some of the most beautiful people traveling the world to the most beautiful locations. It is a year-long process for them to put this issue together and we get full access to the behind-the-scenes of how it happens. ... The theme for the magazine this year was the USA, so each of the five episodes that we did are themed around one particular road trip.”

The SI: The Making of Swimsuit 2015 episodes include “Hawaii” at 8 p.m. Sunday (on the island of Kauai, which was plagued by intense rain, wind and poor light during the eight-day shoot); “Route 66” at 9 p.m. Sunday (from Chicago to California’s Santa Monica Pier, the trip culminating with the first-ever model “selfie” beach shoot); “West Coast” at 8 p.m. Monday (from Washington’s Olympic National Park to California’s Half Moon Bay State Beach); “Natural Beauty” at 8 p.m. Tuesday (in national parks such as Utah’s Monument Valley and Wyoming’s Yellowstone and Grand Tetons); and “Beauty and the East” at 8 p.m. Wednesday (which includes visits to Captiva, Fla., and the U.S. Virgin Islands).

“More than a year of planning and logistics go into the Swimsuit Edition photo shoots,” Babit says, “so we have crews following the models and photographers all year, leading up to the day that the magazine unveils its cover.

“None of us knew who the cover model was going to be until almost the last minute. It’s a very closely guarded secret (Hannah Davis ultimately was selected), so we were editing up until a few days ago.”

The rest of the “Beach Week” lineup consists of a five-hour 101 Sand n’ Surf Hotspots series (which counts down the best beach destinations from around the world, with episodes at 6 p.m. Sunday and 7 p.m. Sunday-Wednesday) and two half-hour installments of Marianela’s Best Beaches (in which host Marianela Pereyra takes whirlwind tours of California and Florida beaches, at 10 and 10:30 p.m. Sunday).

Like many Travel Channel viewers who only get to see these exotic locales on their living-room TVs, Babit doesn’t actually get to see the world as much as he’d like.

“People often ask me, since I work for the Travel Channel, if I get to travel to all these places,” he says. “I wish I could say that I go to all of them, because I love to travel, but most of the time I experience them only through our shows.

This story was originally published February 13, 2015 at 6:00 AM with the headline "Travel Channel takes viewers to the beach."