The 50 Most Epic Shark Week Moments
While the programming of Shark Week, and just about anything on Discovery these days, is less science, and more or less semi-scripted reality tv anymore... it doesn't mean that epic moments aren't still happening. You just have to look for those brief moments amidst the hours of throwaway footage and over-dramatic, music accompanied story-telling.
Think of crap programs like Bayou Sharks, Alien Sharks, etc... and the completely false mock-umentary shorts like Megalodon: The Monster Shark Lives among the couple of mermaid tales...
For me, the first time I saw a great white launch out of the water was pretty awesome. It was an amazing moment of newly documented behavior being shared with the world... Skip ahead a few years, and the millionth time you see it, it's not as special. And I think they've dedicated at least two hour long shows each Shark Week event to this. Sure, it's a new shot, or a new rig, or the guy is on a raft now... blah, blah, blah... Seen it.
If fact, the only worthwhile bits of science to pop out of a Shark Week in the last few years was Discovery's butchering of a British made BBC documentary show called "Shark." And as great as it was, they literally cut the thing in half to make it fit in the timeslot during what used to be Summers greatest week on tv.
By the way, "Shark" is streaming online... but as Shark Week is taking prime interest right now, you may have to cough up a few bucks to rent it. It's totally worth it though. It's the only intelligent shark documentary that has been made in the last decade or so. And being British, it lacks all of the Discovery dramatic crap... No ominous music, no low-slung dramatic narrator constantly teasing a scenario that not only doesn't happen, but would never happen in nature. "Shark" is kind of pure in this world of pretend-science. You should skip Shark Week and just go straight to that.