My favorite week of the year is coming, and it'll be dumber than ever
Shark Week is absolute trash. I love Shark Week.
There are many reasons to be concerned about the impending $111 billion merger between Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery. It's a blatant monopoly that puts roughly 25% of the entertainment market share in the hands of one company. It's tied up in a lot of foreign money from countries in the Middle East with atrocious human rights records. And also Jared Kushner's venture capital firm (but I repeat myself). It'll be run by David Ellison, son of Larry Ellison. Their takeover of CBS has already been disastrous, and now they'll be able to do the same to CNN.
It's bad. It's hard to overstate just how bad it is. But I'm concerned for one extra reason.
When the deal goes through, terrible people are going to be in charge of my favorite week of the year.
Discovery Channel's Shark Week is a 38 year old institution. Think about that. Nearly four decades of Shark Week. It started with 10 hours of content across a few days. Today, it has evolved into a seven-day, 20-hour spectacle. By 2022, there were 272 episodes of Shark Week content.
The Mythbusters hosted Shark Week once. The cast of American Chopper hosted Shark Week. Craig Ferguson, Andy Samberg, Rob Riggle, and Eli Roth have hosted. Shaq hosted. The Rock, Jason Momoa, and John Cena have hosted. Peter Benchley hosted.
I fucking love Shark Week. Shark Week is perfect. I hope it never ends.
Now, let me be clear about something: Shark Week, as it exists today, is utter trash. It is is a disservice to education, conservation, sharks, and humanity. It has taken an interesting and important topic and turned it into intelligence-insulting, reality TV, jump cut slop. It is the only time I can watch a purported documentary and finish the hour knowing less about the subject matter than when I started.
In his 1996 book, The Demon-Haunted World, astronomer, pothead, and prolific science communicator Carl Sagan wrote:
The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance. … We've arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements - transportation, communications, and all other industries; agriculture, medicine, education, entertainment, protecting the environment; and even the key democratic institution of voting - profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.
Shark Week took this warning as a challenge.
From roughly 2010 to 2015, Shark Week aired a number of "docufictions" — utterly made up shows presented as documentaries. Even when it's not just straight up fiction, Shark Week is full of junk science and ratings bait. Shark Week is spectacle, not substance.
Let's speedrun the stats from the "Criticism" section of the Shark Week Wikipedia entry. As of 2022, 43% of episode titles had negative connotations about sharks and only 37% of shows were research-focused. Most episodes don't differentiate between "experts" and scientists. Of the "experts," 94% were white and 79% were male. Even episodes focused on majority-Black countries feature white experts.
Also:
Several non-doctorate men were referred to as "Dr.", and several doctorate-holding women were not labelled with their title.
I say again: Shark Week is trash. Let's talk about some shows from recent years.
There's Jaws vs Mega Croc, in which "the great white shark faces off against the Nile crocodile in a CGI fight to the death." This show is nothing — it's the computer-generated fever dream of an overactive toddler. It also, however, fits neatly in the unofficial series of Jaws vs Leviathan, Jaws vs The Meg, Jaws vs Kraken, Tyson vs Jaws: Rumble on the Reef, and Frankenshark.
Frankenshark, by the way, is just three people what-if-ing the coolest shark they can imagine and making some poor, underpaid animator render it. Look at this screenshot. The overlaid animation only barely matches the TV screen it's supposed to be on. Even the greenscreening of the expert in front of their blank TV is terrible. This show doesn't care. I love it so much.
In 2024, we had Big Shark Energy, 6000 LB Shark, The Real Sharknado, and — and I want you to understand that this series of words is the real name of a real show that real people worked on — Expedition Unknown: Sharks vs Nazis in Paradise. I watched every one of those episodes. I cannot remember a single thing about any of them.
2023 gave us Raiders of the Lost Shark (perfect name, no notes) and Cocaine Sharks. This is the promo image for Cocaine Sharks. If I remember that one correctly, the "expert" admits early on that sharks cannot be affected by cocaine — like, biologically and neurochemically, it just doesn't work on them. The remaining 45 minutes are fully make-em-ups that mean nothing. It's not even empty calories. It's nonexistent entertainment.
2023 also has one of my favorites, Belly of the Beast: Feeding Frenzy, where the experts build a life-sized, fake humpback whale calf carcass and fill it with fish blood. They then stuffed a researcher inside of it and just set it adrift. They repeated the experiment the next year with a bigger fake whale and even more blood. It is a miracle no one died. I have absolutely no clue what we learned by doing this.
That is two years worth of Shark Week. There are 36 more years of Shark Week I haven't even mentioned.
Here's the lineup for this year.
I adore everything about this. The tortured Mount Sharkmore imagery. The cheeky "FIN" at the end. The terrible names.
What could K-Pop Shark Heroes possibly be about? House of Sharks and How to Train a Great White are particularly strained references to pop culture that will have nothing to do with anything. What does My Strange Shark Addiction even mean!? Before I look up anything about this, I'm fucking pumped.
K-Pop Shark Heroes, by the way, is described as, "actor/comedian Ken Jeong and GRAMMY®-nominated artist REI AMI team up in the all-new K-Pop Shark Heroes, using the power of K-Pop to transform the perception of sharks in East Asia and across the globe." It will be the cringiest and most awkward hour of television you can watch. You will learn nothing. There's an excellent chance neither Ken Jeong or REI AMI will be anywhere near a shark at any point in the show. I cannot wait.
There's another stat I skipped over earlier. Only 41% of the experts on the Shark Week shows have a large number of peer-reviewed publications and 23% — 23% — "lack any contribution to the scientific literature." Let me repeat: Shark Week is absolute trash and somehow de-educational television.
The deep-dive that Wikipedia cites doesn't seem to've looked at Shark Week's relationship with the phrases "overfishing" and "climate change." Specifically, the mental and linguistic gymnastics these shows and presenters will go through to avoid acknowledging the effects of humans on sharks. Shark populations will "mysteriously migrate" when their food sources disappear. Shark species' ranges will expand and they'll show up in places thought to be too cold for them. And that implication will just hang in the air.
At first it was weird, but over years of watching Shark Week, the conspicuous absence is unmistakable. It has to be intentional. If it's not humans actively and intentionally hunting sharks, Shark Week is baffled by what could be happening. No one says a thing as anthropogenic climate collapse as the result of an extinction economy hangs heavy over every scene in every episode.
I mean, maybe not over Jackass Shark Week 2.0 or Sharkadelic Summer with Snoop Dogg, but definitely the rest of them.
Shark Week shows are not documentaries. Shark Week is actively harming climate activism and education. Shark Week is ideologically incapable of challenging you. It is not fun to watch or even particularly entertaining. Shark Week is militantly dumb. But Shark Week is also fascinating and I'll watch every episode.
