Shark Week is one of the most loved, feared, and hated weeks on cable TV,
and every year it inspires controversy, debate, rabid binge-watching,
and cupcakes with shark fins sticking out of them. Still, there's plenty to know about the
show besides what you've seen on the screen. Shark Week has been around almost as long as the
Discovery Channel, which launched in 1985. Just two years later, network executives
started wondering how they might be able to convince their potential summertime audience
to stop enjoying the sunshine at the beach and waste away in front of the television instead.
The most popular Shark Week origin story has executives raising the idea at a drunken
after-work party and writing it down on a cocktail napkin. But the most reliable account probably
comes from Tom Siebert, who was a 20-something new hire at the fledgling network in 1987.
According to Siebert, he raised the idea sarcastically during a brainstorming session:
"Look, we know the bigger the animal, the bigger the ratings, and if it can kill you,
that's the best. So why don't we just air shark shows all summer?"
The funniest part about this version of the story is that Siebert wasn't even serious. He only
threw out the idea because he was annoyed that the network was really just worried about their bottom
line, and he later recalled sitting aghast as the idea was actually discussed. That night the idea
was passed along to Discovery's founder and CEO, John Hendricks, who was really into it. Now, three
decades later, viewers all get to be pissed off every year because megalodons no longer exist.
Shark Week was hostless for the first few years, then in 1994 the network landed Peter Benchley,
author of "Jaws," as its first host. At that time,
Benchley was celebrating the 20th anniversary of his best-selling man-eating shark novel,
which was the basis for Steven Spielberg's 1975 blockbuster of the same name.
Benchley introduced each Shark Week program from a location where the famously terrifying movie
had been shot, proving once and for all that Shark Week isn't about sensationalizing the
ocean-dwelling predator — it's about science and education. After Benchley's appearance,
Shark Week has featured celebrity hosts regularly. Notable alumni include Mike
Rowe from "Dirty Jobs," comedian Craig Ferguson, Rob Lowe, and supermodel Heidi Klum — because
supermodels and sharks have so much in common. Shark Week has some enemies, including marine
activists and conservationists who want us to think that sharks are gentle creatures, like
kittens — only with five rows of giant teeth and blood-stained lips. To be fair, though, Discovery
has had to stand on both ends of the ratings teeter-totter — does it air sensationalized
programming featuring blood, violence and death, or does it tell the often-boring but much more
educational truth about sharks? For example, in 2014, ABC News reported that death by cow is
about five times more common than death by shark. Sharks kill an average of four people annually,
while cows gore or trample to death an average of 22 people. Audiences probably won't see the
Discovery Network's historic launch of "Cow Week" any time soon, mostly because cows
don't have the aforementioned five rows of giant teeth and blood-stained lips. But hey,
maybe all it will take is another sarcastic pitch in a brainstorming session. Here's to hoping.
Conservationists are understandably concerned about the sensationalism — it seems like the
network features more violence every year, which typically includes dramatized recreations of shark
attacks. Such programming creates the false impression that sharks are more dangerous
than they are, which has a negative impact on conservation efforts. The truth is that shark
populations around the world are in decline, and most people don't seem to care. And although
there's no proof that Shark Week is to blame, it's hard for a lot of people to internalize the
idea that the great white that just ate some guy on Shark Week needs to be protected.
Clearly, all those conservationists have never seen the "Sharknado" series of films,
or they might know that the man-eating instinct is so ingrained in the shark psyche that sharks will
attack anything that moves, even after falling thousands of feet out of a passing tornado. But
hey, guess what, "Sharknado" is actually fiction. Yes, it's true, most sharks will
actually die after a 50,000-foot drop, and any that survive wouldn't have much of an appetite.
Shark Week does occasionally make an effort to tell the truth about sharks,
and this was especially true in the early years. Since then, the network has also
invested heavily in some of the world's best videographers and documentarians.
And the network has never really lied about the nature of the shark attack:
Humans don't live in the ocean, and as such are not on the sharks' list of approved snacks. Former
Discovery Channel president and general manager W. Clark Bunting told Time magazine in 2010:
"We hope that as we tell these stories, people hear the real message. The victims
were in the wrong place at the wrong time." Studies pretty consistently show that people
who watch a lot of crime dramas overestimate their chances of becoming a victim of crime.
So it's not really surprising that a similar study by researchers from Indiana University
and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, shows that people who watch Shark Week
tend to overestimate their chances of getting eaten by a shark and continue to react with fear.
They had 500 people watch clips from Shark Week, from violent shark attacks to sharks swimming
peacefully through the water, followed by a public service announcement that talked about
the need for shark conservation. Researchers discovered —shockingly — that those short
messages after the violent programming didn't seem to make people any less afraid of sharks.
Another study, published in Marine Policy, surveyed over 180 people on their shark knowledge
and correlated that with support of conservation efforts. No surprise:
the media does play a part in sensationalizing the marine animal and causing anti-shark sentiment.
So really, it seems like Shark Week is ultimately doomed to scare people, even if it shows nothing
but sharks having tea parties and attending 12-step meetings, a la "Finding Nemo."
"It's been three weeks since my last fish. On my honor, or I'll be chopped up and made into soup".
Because ultra slow-motion video of airborne great white sharks and real-life shark bites aren't
already more terrifying than fiction, in 2013 Discovery decided what Shark Week needed to do was
make stuff up and call it a documentary. The 2013 episode, "Megalodon: The Monster Shark Lives," was
Shark Week's most-watched program of the year, but it was fiction. You had to sit through the
entire episode before reading the devastating disclaimer at the very end, which read:
"None of the institutions or agencies that appear in the film
are [affiliated] with it in any way, nor have approved its contents."
In fact even the disclaimer was misleading — it said that,
quote, "certain events and characters in the film have been dramatized,"
that "megalodon was a real shark," and that sightings "continue to this day".
Basically, it just waxed on in every way without explicitly saying "what you just saw was fiction."
Despite other clues that the documentary was fake, like really bad CGI and "scientists" who were
obviously reciting scripted material, some viewers believed what they were seeing. When they learned
they'd been duped, they were pretty righteously pissed off. Even so, Shark Week's executive
producer Michael Sorensen waved off the backlash and praised the two-hour special as the, quote,
"ultimate Shark Week fantasy." But by 2015, with the network still reeling from the bad press,
executives told Vulture there would be no more fake documentaries.
In 2017, Shark Week promos hyped another monster event: 23-time gold medalist Michael Phelps was
going to race a great white shark! Now, in all fairness, anyone who stopped to think about it for
more than five seconds should have realized that it would have been impossible for Phelps to race
an actual great white, even if you left out the whole part where he'd have probably gotten eaten
before crossing the finish line. But, you know ... ratings. Sharks don't swim in a straight line,
and never mind the logistics of trying to put one in an Olympic-sized swimming pool. But viewers
were still pissed off, maybe because they were still smarting from the whole megalodon thing.
It's really hard to blame this one on the network — they were pretty open about the fact that this
was not going to be an in-the-flesh race between actual shark and actual man. There were even
pre-show interviews in publications like Vanity Fair that explained exactly how it was going to
go down, but that didn't stop half the viewing population from feeling annoyed when they were
told in the last three minutes of the one-hour program that the race would be a simulation.
Ultimately, this story doesn't say as much about the network's drive for ratings
as it does about the fact that most of the viewing population doesn't really pay that much
attention to disclaimers or, you know, logic. Shark Week might be controversial, but it's not
just something that people casually tune into if they're bored on a summer afternoon. Shark Week
has cult status, like the "Rocky Horror Picture Show" if Dr. Frank-N-Furter was a great white,
and Brad and Janet were a pair of hapless surfers wearing chum underpants. According
to Talking Points Memo, in 2010 Stephen Colbert famously declared Shark Week to be,
quote, "one of the two holiest of holidays" — with the other being the
week after Christmas. And on an episode of "30 Rock," Tracy Morgan once gave the sage advice:
"Live every week like it's Shark Week."
Fans don't just watch Shark Week, they live Shark Week. Five minutes on Pinterest will
give you enough Shark Week party ideas to last until the 2120 installment. Even Martha Stewart
is in on the fun, with a whole list of Shark Week ideas including shark cupcakes, shark-inspired
outerwear, and a chair made out of stuffed toy sharks. Yes, a chair. Made out of stuffed
toy sharks. Needless to say, we're still waiting for Stewart to drop a walkthrough for meat suits.
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