I’d like to begin today with a simple confession: My wife and I have always liked Shark Week.
Ever since we met in 2003, Discovery Channel’s end-of-summer celebration of all things shark has been must-see TV for us. Just as Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom once captivated our imaginations as kids, so this cable channel’s annual exposé of the oceans’ most fearsome finned predators has become something that we look forward to every August.
But the new content this year has started to feel a bit long in the tooth. This year, to put it bluntly, it feels like Discovery Channel has jumped the shark. Literally.
Let me give you two examples.
Back in 2000, a group of folks traveled to Seal Island off the coast of South Africa to film great white sharks breaching the water—completely—as they attacked seals. It was jaw-dropping (or, jaw-thrusting, perhaps I should say) footage, as 5,000 pound, 20-foot-long fish exploded from the water over and over again. I’d never seen anything like it.
This year, some folks producing a sequel of sorts called Ultimate Air Jaws returned to the area to film again. This time, though, it wasn’t enough just to get footage of great whites’ spectacular aerial hunting maneuvers. Upping the dramatic ante considerably, they put a guy with a camera on a little raft towing a fake seal a mere 10 feet behind him … and waited for the sharks to do their thing.
They did, of course. The sharks jumped and jumped and jumped … practically close enough for the photographer to touch them. The footage? Even more incredible than before. But more so than ever, I found myself thinking, This dude could easily become a shark sandwich if things go wrong.
The folks at Discovery know that, of course. And it speaks to the fact that they have to keep coming up with ever-more-extreme encounters with sharks to keep luring visitors after 23 years of Shark Week.
Another new program this year featured a guy talking about how to survive certain kinds of shark attacks … basically by recreating those perilous situations. One of them involved luring a shark into a cage with him and closing the door! Again, I thought, Oh, please, now Discovery is actually harassing sharks (instead of just feeding them chum on camera) in the name of drawing an audience.
In both examples, the ethos of extreme reality TV seems to be saturating Shark Week to the point that it no longer feels like engaging educational television (and, to be honest, maybe it ceased to be that a long time ago and I’m just figuring it out). Now, it seems like Discovery Channel is competing with all the other death-defying, high-risk reality TV out there.
And for me, at least, that’s made Shark Week a bit less appealing and a bit more like so many other shows out there that exploit humans, animals or both in the name of ratings.
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