Shark Week Sucker
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.
August 2nd, 2007 at 10:49 am
I’d take Mike Rowe or Bear Grylls anyday over that whiny Les Stroud. MUTE!!! MUTE!!! MUTE!!!