Shark Week Extravaganza!

CCC'S SHARK WEEK EXTRAVAGANZA! (Part One)

For nearly two decades, there were no seven days in the summer I looked forward to more than Shark Week on Discovery Channel. I used to love Shark Week, and it still airs every year, but the glory days are in the past. I’ll get more into that later, but the reason I decided to finally write something about the longest-running cable programming event in TV history is because I was longing for the good old days of Shark Week this summer—I longed for its former greatness so badly, in fact, that I decided to just make my own Shark Week.

I have been fascinated with sharks since before I could even swim properly. I was that five-year-old kid dog-paddling around in his life jacket in Hawaii who wanted to come across a dorsal fin cutting through the waves. Whether it was creative writing or independent silent reading or research projects, I frequently found ways to learn more about sharks in school, and my passion for sharks has not waned one bit. Perhaps one of the reasons I’ve always loved sharks is because I can relate to them. I love swimming, I love eating fish, and I have often felt misunderstood. Joking aside, sharks are fascinating because they are more ancient than dinosaurs (another lifelong fascination of mine), they exist in an environment completely different from ours, and they have abilities unlike any other creatures on earth.

Many species can pose a threat to humans, and that, really, is why Shark Week exists. Humans will never be able to enter a shark’s environment on their level without the assistance of technology, but if someone is just swimming out in the ocean, they are at their mercy. Sharks come in many shapes and sizes, but a number of them have a built-in fear factor, especially those large enough to eat a human whole, and have always been ripe for starring roles in entertaining tales of suspense, action, and terror. Winding the clock back to the 1970s, author Peter Benchley realized a great white shark—the largest predatory shark in the seas—was a perfect villain for a thriller novel, and that’s exactly what he wrote, which was then turned into a film by Universal Pictures. I don’t even need to give the title for it to be obvious what movie I’m referring to.

The 1980s must have been one of the worst decades for sharks in their entire 400-million-year existence on earth, and that’s really saying something, given they’ve survived multiple mass extinctions that wiped out the majority of living species on the land and in the sea. Sharks were seen as mindless killing machines by millions of people in a post-Jaws world, and not just great whites. It seemed Jaws had given fisherman and everyday folk the excuse they had been waiting for to bring about the extinction of sharks, with numerous species hunted nearly to the brink. While the Jaws sequels in 1978, 1983, and 1987 were nowhere near the worldwide phenomena that the original was, they certainly didn’t help the case for sharks being worth protecting.

Nigel Marven in Bull Shark: World's Deadliest Shark (2004)

Peter Benchley realized what his source material did for the reputation of sharks, and he lamented that result. He didn’t hate sharks—in fact, Benchley loved sharks and dedicated much of the rest of his life to educating people about them and preserving them and their habitats. It’s fitting, then, that Peter Benchley was one of the first “hosts” of Shark Week, all the way back in 1994. Shark Week began even earlier, in 1988, and I tuned in for the first time during one of the seasons when zoologist-and-adventurer Nigel Marven was the host in the early 2000s. The week-long programming block began without a host, with Benchley being the only one for the first decade, then after Marven hosted for three consecutive years, there was a shift. A new host each year became a trend as it grew in popularity, and while there were some great ones who were Discovery Channel regulars and brought some credibility to the programming, like Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman of MythBusters and Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs, it quickly turned into a popularity contest, and now a celebrity host is an expectation.

Before I proceed to what Shark Week has devolved into, I’ll cover what constituted my own personal Shark Week schedule for 2025 and explain some of my essentials for what makes for a great marathon. This is not the first time I have created my own Shark Week or enhanced it before I stopped watching new episodes. In 2016 I supplemented that year’s Shark Week broadcast with old episodes throughout the week and saw The Shallows in the movie theatre, and in 2015 I saw a special re-release of Jaws on the big screen on the last day of that year’s Shark Week. I stopped watching the new broadcasts in the late 2010s, around the time Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps raced a shark (except he didn’t really, it was faked), but the concept of a marathon of shows and movies about sharks is one that will never get old to me. Check out part two for my Shark Week Essentials, and part three for why Shark Week is no longer what it used to be, both coming soon! 

 

Part Two: https://cccmovies.blogspot.com/2025/08/shark-week-essentials-cccs-shark-week.html

Part Three: https://cccmovies.blogspot.com/2025/08/the-current-state-of-shark-week-cccs.html