I love Shark Week. I could watch any show consisting of shark footage any time of year, but particularly when it’s July/August and I’m uncomfortably hot most of the time. Just as I love watching Dr. Zhivago (all that snow!) when it’s hot out, something about the underwater photography of all those sharks makes me feel cooler.

So when I started reading this Slate piece, I was overjoyed that I’m not the only freak who thinks like that.

A few more sentences in though, I found a dig on Shark Week’s 20th Anniversary kick-off show: Ocean of Fear. I anticipated this show with as much gusto as I can muster in hot weather. So I was trepidatious about someone ripping on it.

But then I read on and realized that the whole article is dissing on my favorite summertime event. And then, to my own shock and horror, I realized I agreed with pretty much everything Mr. Patterson wrote. I haven’t seen a few of the shows he referenced, but GTB and I had the EXACT same reaction to Deadly Stripes. In essence: why bother freaking us out in the beginning of the show with scary sentences like, “Divers say, if you see a Tiger Shark, get out of the water immediately!” (which they actually said twice, by the way) if you are going to spend the rest of the hour telling the warm-and-fuzzy story of a free diver who “befriends” and actually names a Tiger Shark (Delores, in case you were curious) and then fears he’s lost her to a Great White only to return to her home waters for one last sad dive to find her alive and well? Mixed messaging? Yep. Annoying? Yep.

Anyway, I don’t really have a point here. I just wanted to write about Shark Week and how much I love it. And how I have to mute the last part of every show because I’ve already bought into the idea that we do far more harm to sharks than they do to us, and I don’t need further convincing. Oh, and that I preferred the guy from Dirty Jobs as the emcee WAY more than the Survivorman dude. And that even though I agree with the Slate article, I’m still DVRing every last second of Shark Week and will watch, annoyed or not, every one of them.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 31st, 2007 at 11:55 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.