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.

Shark Week Essentials: CCC’s Shark Week Extravaganza! (Part Two)

SHARK WEEK ESSENTIALS

 

In Part One of my Shark Week Extravaganza, I gave some background on the long-running summer TV event, and explained that I no longer watch Shark Week as it airs, having stopped a number of years ago, but I created my own Shark Week this year, stuffing at least one shark-related piece of programming into each day of one of my summer weeks. I’ll summarize what my schedule was, then explain what each day’s show or film was all about.

 

Monday: TheMalibuArtist (various videos) and Cinemassacre’s “Top 50 Shitty Shark Movies”

Tuesday: Air Jaws (the original)

Wednesday: MythBusters Jaws Special

Thursday: Deadly Waters

Friday: Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story

Saturday: Supersized Sharks, Deep Blood

Sunday: Jaws (the original)

 

I started off the week with two blocks of programming you would never see during an actual Shark Week broadcast: intimate, undramatized footage of great whites off the coast of California, and a countdown list of terrible shark movies. TheMalibuArtist is a YouTube channel hosted by Carlos Gauna who is a professional photographer and drone operator, and he has captured some of the most stunning footage of great whites I have ever seen. His calm narration and lack of jump cuts make his videos comforting, but they are also uniquely insightful, with his observational knowledge of shark behaviour providing information I have never learned in all my years of watching Shark Week. 

Cinemassacre is a production company run by James Rolfe I’ve talked about many times before, and while his channel is educational only in the sense of movie history and filmmaking, his video about the worst shark movies ever made is one of the best videos of its kind. I still laugh thinking about the unhinged, frenzied intensity of James trying to saw open the DVD of Hammerhead just to get the disc out. Even though none of the films are in the traditional spirit of shark education, I still think there’s a place for shark movies in celebrating Shark Week, and this video encapsulates a huge collection of them in easily digestible snippets.

You can’t have Shark Week without Air Jaws. I rewatched the original program this year, Air Jaws: Sharks of South Africa (2001), which first revealed to the world what great whites were up to over there: ambushing seals from below and rocketing up out of the water, just as the title alludes to. In addition to the staggering behaviour (there must be at least two dozen unique shots of sharks coming out of the water throughout the runtime), there’s a segment later in the episode where the sharks feed on a dead whale carcass, and I can remember the shock and awe I felt the first time seeing so many massive sharks throwing their heads like sledgehammers at the carcass and chomping off tens of pounds of blubber and flesh in mere seconds. Then, to make it even crazier, one of the researchers climbs onto the remains of the carcass to film the sharks even closer! To date, there have been fifteen Shark Week episodes with “Air Jaws” as part of the title, and subsequent episodes have had some great moments, too, such as the first aerial shot of a great white breaching. While Shark Week has often been criticized for focusing too much on great whites, even in the heyday of specials, I can’t say I ever get tired of watching them take to the air like that.

Recently, I’ve been enjoying revisiting one of my all-time favourite TV shows thanks to whole episodes getting uploaded to YouTube, so it was fitting to revisit the MythBusters Jaws Special, as well, which I have seen perhaps more times than any other MythBusters episode. Running over ninety minutes without commercials, they tackle numerous myths from the movie, and even though they end up debunking classic moments like the shark pulling the barrels below the surface or exploding from Chief Brody shooting the air tank in its mouth, it’s not as if the results devalue Jaws. If anything, this episode just made me love the movie even more when I was a kid, because it’s honoring the film while staying true to what MythBusters was all about at the show’s best. I learned a great deal not only about the science of sharks from their informal testing and research, but also about the behind-the-scenes of one of my favourite movies. It originally aired in 2005, and an additional shark special aired a few years later, which is also worth checking out.

The episode Deadly Waters was the premiere for the 2009 season, hosted by Survivorman himself, Les Stroud (the season’s de facto host), and I had not seen this episode in a very long time. Not to skip ahead and become critical of Shark Week in its current state before I finish covering my personal Shark Week lineup—I don’t want to, ah, jump the shark here—but it disappointed me upon rewatch, because it represents the beginning of that devolution I alluded to earlier. I wouldn’t go as far as to say I have a love-hate relationship with Les Stroud, but I’ve enjoyed watching him survive in many of his programs, and other times have found him a bit annoying and whiny. Here, he’s just overly dramatic, which fits with the show’s rapid editing and premise of visiting the most dangerous shark-infested waters around the world, but doesn’t provide many unique or useful insights to the sharks featured.

Before I get to Friday and the grand finale of my week, let me jump ahead to Saturday, starting with Supersized Sharks: the newest TV episode I watched this year, having aired last year as part of National Geographic’s Shark Fest. With the sad state of Shark Week these days, if you want actual scientific knowledge, it seems you have to go over to National Geographic to watch their now annual marathon of programming, but hey, if you want to see cameramen inviting sharks to bite them “just for the shot” then I guess Shark Week is all you need (yes, that seriously has been reported). Supersized Sharks was a pretty banal program, just exploring an island off Australia that has lots of large tiger sharks, but I still appreciated the content more than anything I would have seen in the Shark Week of the same year. It wasn’t overproduced, but the one scientist/host wasn’t that interesting, and they didn’t end up revealing any big discoveries or new information by the end.

I think the enduring popularity of Jaws is what has kept Shark Week going, even more than people’s interest in sharks. Even though Jaws gave sharks a bad reputation and negatively impacted them, it’s not as if that was Steven Spielberg’s goal. He tried to make the best movie he could with what he had, and he succeeded, but no one, and I mean absolutely not a single filmmaker, has been able to make another shark movie that even touches the greatness of Jaws. I’ve covered some pretty bad shark movies on this blog before, but I find it oddly comforting to indulge in a bad shark movie during Shark Week in addition to the golden standard.

I gave Deep Blood (1989) a chance, having never seen it before, hoping it might provide some cheesy shark attacks, given it was an Italian production released the same year as the similarly themed Killer Crocodile (also Italian, and very gory). Deep Blood is about some kids who make a blood pact, then when they’re grown up have to battle a shark possessed by an evil spirit that comes to feed along their favourite beach, and oh my stars! This movie gets zero stars! The directing, writing, acting, dialogue, cinematography, special effects, editing, pacing, and action? All unbelievably bad. I laughed a few times when the plastic toy shark (meant to be a real great white) swam up past the model shipwreck, but those were the only morsels of entertainment I had to chew on. It is Jaws-ploitation at its most shameful and least interesting, so please do not waste your time, even if you like bad shark movies. Some other options include: the Jaws sequels, Red Water, and The Meg. You can skew slightly better (but still inferior to Jaws), with The Shallows, Deep Blue Sea, or 47 Meters Down, or cheaper, with Sharknado, Avalanche Sharks, or Raiders of the Lost Shark. Just don’t go as low as Deep Blood.

It’s time to wrap this up with JAWS. What we have here is a perfect engine—er, an entertainment machine. It’s really a miracle of filmmaking. I mean, what else can I say? The new documentary, Jaws @ 50, about the making of one of the greatest films in motion picture history, came out this summer to celebrate the 50^th anniversary, and while I wouldn’t say it’s “definitive”, as the subtitle puts it, what it is, inarguably, is an up-to-date celebration of the legacy of Jaws. It actually brought a tear to my eye. Jaws is a movie that is incredibly special to me, but not just me, and isn’t that what cinema is all about, at its absolute peak? Jaws is a form of bonding. I’m just some guy living his life as best he can, and then in the documentary we see industry titans like James Cameron and Steven Soderbergh talk about the profound impact and lasting power and influence of Jaws and how they were affected and inspired by it. We are all the same in that way, because it’s a part of who we are. It’s a truly unique piece of art.

What I found most interesting and exciting in the doc was the behind-the-scenes footage from the production, most of it new to me, with the audio cleaned up in editing so well it sounds like it was recorded this year, not over 50 years ago. It uses some archival clips, interviews, and materials seen multiple times in other Jaws documentaries throughout the years, but the new interview footage with not only remaining cast and crew (plus Spielberg himself, and often actress Emily Blunt, for some reason) but the children of Peter Benchley and Robert Shaw makes it all feel worthy of becoming a part of the legacy and adding to the historical record of the legendary film. The question is posed by the documentarians early on, asking Spielberg if there’s anything he hasn’t said about Jaws at this point. I think the answer ended up being yes. I don’t know how much Jaws @ 50 will resonate with viewers who are not Jaws mega fans or have never seen older documentaries about it, but for me, it was a highlight of the summer and just made me want to watch the movie again for the billionth time. I would certainly recommend it, along with The Shark is Still Working, which is even more in-depth. As for the 1975 film itself, I really don’t have anything new to add at the moment, so I’ll link in what I wrote for my Favourite Films Series: https://cccmovies.blogspot.com/2017/06/jaws-1975-favourite-films-series.html

Those are my essentials for peak Shark Week! A mix of entertainment, new science, old discoveries, and some shark fiction. As I will get into with the third and final part of my Shark Week Extravaganza, fiction has, unfortunately, taken precedence over science on Discovery Channel, but it’s a less recent development than many viewers may realize.

 

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

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