The Current State of Shark Week: CCC’s Shark Week Extravaganza! (Part Three)

Conclusion: The Current State of Shark Week | CCC’s Shark Week Extravaganza! 

 

Part One: https://cccmovies.blogspot.com/2025/08/shark-week-extravaganza.html

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

In Part One, I gave some background on the golden age of Shark Week, and in Part Two, I covered what my personal “essentials” are for peak Shark Week. Unfortunately, I find myself reminiscing about great memories of Shark Week that are getting further and further into the past, and I’ve started to wonder if I’m nostalgic for Shark Week as a mythic memory more so than the actual programming. I can remember multiple times the sheer hype for it—oh man, Shark Week is almost here! I wonder what the first episode will be about? I would check the TV guide, I’d see the commercials, and I even remember one year getting my dad to pre-program the VCR so it would record episodes while we were away camping. I distinctly remember another summer in 2007 when I went camping and came back on Sunday July 29^th, which was the day Ocean of Fear: Worst Shark Attacks Ever premiered, and I had to quickly unpack so I wouldn’t miss it, then I fell asleep while it was on because it was so boring!

After that, the hype dissipated with each new season, it seemed, but then in the mid-2010s it felt like Shark Week had picked back up again, only to decline past the point of no return. One year I watched Shark Week on Discovery and the additional concurrent marathon on the National Geographic Channel, Shark Fest, and found Nat Geo actually had better programming. In the beginning, Shark Week was about scientific research and showing sharks in their natural habitat. Nat Geo’s Shark Fest adheres to this pretty closely still, and actually, Shark Fest runs for multiple weeks, with a wide array of episodes, some new, some old. I didn’t mind when Shark Week aired re-runs, especially if they were good episodes, but then it became all about the hot new shark encounters and attacks and footage, and re-runs seemed to stop happening, even though new episodes provided little I hadn’t heard before.

The big Shark Week problems can be boiled down to the following three basics:

1) Repetitive Content

2) Spectacle Over Science 

3) Profit Over Education

The repetition started to come in the form of the same sharks being shown again and again, then I started to notice the same pieces of information about sharks getting repeated, and then it even went as far as the format of the episodes being similar, such as with Air Jaws. I used to like seeing new scientists and experts each year, then when I started to tune out it seemed like cameraman Andy Casagrande became the only guy they ever spoke to or featured regularly, and he is not a shark expert. The debut of some new celebrity host each year became tiring, too, especially when they had no authentic connection to sharks. I didn’t hate when horror director Eli Roth returned to host from 2015 to 2017 (I don’t know what qualified him other than being a big Jaws fan), and even when Craig Ferguson hosted in 2010 he at least went in the water with the sharks and seemed to be learning something alongside the audience, but having Jason Momoa host just because the dude played Aquaman is pitiful.

The spectacle over science problem grew and grew as each new season came along. It started even as far back as the mid-2000s when I had only seen a few seasons. MythBusters was the beginning of Discovery’s sea change from strictly documentary-style programming to a blend of science with reality TV, until it eventually became primarily reality TV with junk science and pseudoscientific content. I love their Jaws special, but subsequent Shark Week “documentaries” that linked in directly to Jaws were more strained and less informative. Shark Week viewership went up in the late 2000s, and as Discovery’s programming began to change, Shark Week changed, too, but the views kept increasing: that’s why I call it a devolution instead of evolution. The programming had to keep more people tuning in, so it started to become about advertising ever more sensational shows, with dramatic recreations, divers in ever more dangerous situations, sharks deemed more dangerous than any before them, and shark attack victims telling their tales. There’s a stark contrast between the objective, informative Anatomy of a Shark Bite episode from 2003 and the overdramatized CSI-style “investigation” in Great White Serial Killer that aired ten years later.

The ultimate low point came in the form of Megalodon: The Monster Shark Lives (2013). I watched that episode when it aired with absolute focus, totally floored at the thought that evidence of the giant extinct shark still being alive may have been found. As the episode went on, my eyes began to narrow in suspicion as the story became more and more farfetched. I thought, wait a minute…and then like the curtain being pulled back in The Wizard of Oz, I realized nothing I had just seen was legitimate. It reminded me of when I had been hoodwinked by a classmate in middle school who convinced me she was related to creature effects creator Stan Winston, but later I found out she was just messing with me. Why would Discovery Channel air this as if it were a real documentary? A supposed picture of a Megalodon dorsal fin captured in the modern day was so obviously a fake cgi fin that I was enraged before the end credits even rolled, and felt vindicated when I checked out other responses online that confirmed I was not the only one upset about it.

Something I find concerning is the potential for Shark Week to actually now undo some of the good done in the past, by retraining people to think of sharks as dangerous and therefore unworthy of preservation. I read some interesting statistics about how many episode names have key words in them such as “attack” and “deadly” and how often the top three most dangerous species are focused on (great white sharks, tiger sharks, and bull sharks). In actuality, there are over 500 different species out there, and most are not a threat to humans. It’s all sensationalized nonsense, because that’s what executives think will bring in the most viewers. Apparently they must be right to a degree, because viewership hasn’t declined enough for them to outright cancel the media machine that Shark Week has become.

It’s no coincidence that the star of Jaws is the same species that gets the most dedicated episodes year after year, despite white shark populations actually shrinking in places where they used to be common way back when Shark Week first began. Don’t get me wrong, I love great whites, but once the information started getting regurgitated instead of developed further, it showed me there was no longer any effort being made in furthering the audiences’ understanding of them or how to protect them. I also started to notice newer Shark Week episodes often seemed intent to answer a big question about sharks, only for the question to be brushed aside by the end or left unanswered, without any resolution or satisfying conclusion. Discovery Channel’s forced narratives in documentaries are a problem that extends beyond just Shark Week. If you watch enough BBC documentaries, you start to notice the major difference in style and content between American documentaries of the same subjects, and how much better the BBC docs are.

It might have seemed counterintuitive for me to include so much Jaws content in my personal Shark Week, but when there’s a clear line drawn between what’s real and not real, there’s no issue. Jaws is pure fiction, but it’s a movie that had a real impact, so celebrating it alongside depictions of how sharks actually are is perfectly acceptable. What’s not acceptable is when the animals are abused, mistreated, or exploited just for the sake of a show. Jaws is fifty years old, remember. It is a vintage piece of shark cinema. Based on current understanding of sharks, dealing with real animals should be done with care, caution, and respect, but there have been multiple times in multiple Shark Week episodes when both animals and people have been in real danger. I never gave much thought as a kid/teen to the potential issues of repeatedly baiting sharks with chum just to get a cool shot of them. I can’t emphasize enough how Shark Week is about spectacle first and foremost now, and I’m sure if Peter Benchley were still alive today, he would be less than thrilled with what it has become.

While it does bug me when people are described as “experts” in the field but have no real qualifications, what turned me off Shark Week the most was the growing focus on historical shark attacks and dramatically recreating them. Blood in the Water (2009) was the two-hour film to kick off Shark Week that year, and I found it mostly dull, just like the aforementioned Ocean of Fear. Drawing out these events into such overproduced, overexplained specials is not necessary, and not what I first tuned in to Shark Week for. The Megalodon mockumentary almost falls into this category, though is uniquely bad for outright lying to viewers, but it has the same artificial look and melodramatic energy. Shark attacks are extremely rare, but executives know they can be advertised as a way to draw in viewers, and that’s why they get so much focus.

I feel grateful that I can craft my own Shark Week to relive the good old days, try to learn more about them, and pay tribute to some of the most fantastic predators on planet earth. I own the Shark Week: 20^th Anniversary Collection, released in 2007, which has four DVDs of various episodes, including the first two Air Jaws and the MythBusters Jaws Special as a bonus disc, as well as the Jaws of Steel Collection, released in 2010, with two discs, but there are many collections out there, and numerous episodes can be bought digitally, or streamed. I don’t watch cable anymore, and I doubt I’ll ever go back to watching Shark Week as it airs, but that’s okay. Even though sharks almost seem intent to disprove it, nothing is meant to last forever, and at it’s best, Shark Week has done its job: educated people about sharks, brought greater awareness to the threats they face, and entertained the living hell out of us with boundary-pushing footage of some of the coolest, weirdest, and scariest members of the animal kingdom. Who knows? Maybe one day it will return to its roots, but for now, I’m content to keep the best of Shark Week as fond memories, and recreate it myself as best I can.