'Animal Practice': About the time a snake almost killed Bobby Lee...

Spend some time with the cast of NBC's new comedy "Animal Practice" and one of the first things they'll bring up is the time a snake almost killed costar Bobby Lee.

"Did everyone hear about the Bobby Lee snake incident? There's a scene in the pilot where he's got a snake wrapped around his face," Justin Kirk tells Zap2it on a recent visit to the set of the NBC sitcom. "It emitted an 'I don't want to be here' juice on his face."

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When Lee tells the story, he tries to brush it off like the boa constrictor incident wasn't a big deal. Tyler Labine puts it a little more dramatically. "It was trying to kill you. I want to milk the drama of this," he says.

Lee gives in. "This boa constrictor is around my neck. It's squeezing as hard as it can," he says.

Well, maybe not as hard as it can. "I don't know if it was as hard as it could, was it? Your head would have popped off," Labine notes.

"Well, I didn't ask him! 'Yo dude, are you at a 10 or a 7?' No. I don't speak the language of the snake, but to me, it was hard," Lee retorts. "I almost died. It was squeezing and then it was, 'What's the smell?' It smelled like pure diarrhea. Pure cut diarrhea out of the skin, but it was yellow. I don't know what that smell was. I wasn't at the killing fields, but that's what it smelled like."

Labine confirms: "You smelled pretty horrible after. And he made sure he went around and made everybody smell it afterwards."

"I did," Lee says. "Because of what I'm sacrificing for the show."

But working with the animals isn't always horrifying, causing actors to go home with hives on their faces. Betsy Sodaro, who plays wacky animal handler Angela, says things get downright adorable at times. "Yesterday I came in to shoot the last scene and in the atrium part [of the set] there were like 10 dogs all just laying down with each other and just so calm. It was pretty adorable."

The cuteness can also be distracting, Sodaro says. "I do want to pet them all. Yesterday we were shooting and this one dog kept looking at me and I of course just kept looking back because he was so cute, and then the trainer came up and was like 'If they get distracted by you, ignore them.' And I was like 'Aw, but they're so cute! I just want to pet them and play with them.'"

"Animal Practice" airs Wednesdays at 8 p.m. on NBC.