In 2013, human understanding of the ocean underwent a paradigm shift thanks to a documentary that aired on the Discovery Channel.
It started off the coast of South Africa when a brutal accident capsized a mid-sized deep-sea fishing charter boat and resulted in the deaths of everyone aboard. Initially, it was believed that the sinking was the inadvertent result of a breached whale surfacing for air. However, a closer examination of the vessel (in conjunction with recovered footage extracted from a camera found amongst the wreckage) suggested that a shark far larger than mankind had ever seen was what brought the ship down.
This shocking revelation launched an investigation headed by marine biologist Collin Drake, who deduced that only one animal could possibly inflict damage of such magnitude – the megalodon, a behemoth of a shark thought to have met its demise about 3 million years ago based on the fragmentary remains of it that exist today. In the team’s search for evidence confirming the monster’s existence, a number of previously unearthed amateur photos and videos lent credence to Drake’s hypothesis.
Eventually, after laying out a 40-foot-long humpback whale decoy and thousands of gallons of chum (hurled across 5 miles of the ocean’s surface using specially designed “chum guns”), a member of Drake’s team was able to tag a massive shark using a harpoon gun. Though the documentary is careful to note that the identity of the shark remains “inconclusive”, all signs suggest that the beast encountered by Drake and his team was indeed the ancient apex predator they were after.
As the credits roll, the tracker reveals that the shark has rapidly descended over 6,500 ft below the surface within a matter of seconds. Viewers are left to believe that man-eating sharks far more fearsome than the stuff of our greatest nightmares lurk deep beneath the sea, living in a constant state of insatiable hunger.
If all of this seems too incredible to be true, that’s because it is. Despite airing on the Discovery Channel with a high production value and (seemingly) expert analysis from bonafide researchers, the events that occurred in Megalodon: Monster Shark Lives are entirely fictional. The production was created for the sole purpose of filling a spot in Discovery’s annual Shark Week lineup.
As the name suggests, Shark Week is a recurring US cable programming event featuring nothing but shark-related content. It has been a mainstay of the Discovery Channel since 1988, having garnered millions upon millions of viewers over the course of 35 years.
In fairness, Megalodon: Monster Shark Lives did draw on a few real-life building blocks. For instance, the idea of lazarus taxon thought to be long-extinct reappearing without warning is clearly derived from the relatively recent re-discovery of the coelacanth in 1938. Like the coelacanth, megalodon really did roam the seas a few million years ago.
But unlike the coelacanth, absolutely no evidence exists suggesting that megalodon might still survive in the ocean’s murky depths1. There was no ravaged South African charter boat, nor an ill-fated fishing crew lost at sea. “Collin Drake” is actually an actor named Darron Meyers.
Discovery preemptively defended itself by providing a few brief disclaimers at the start and conclusion of the program. The first is quite vague and non-committal, reading as follows:
“Megalodon was a real shark. Legends of giant sharks persist all over the world. There is still great debate about what they might be.”
The second is a footer that runs at the bottom of the screen for just a moment as Drake’s team celebrates their incredible find:
“None of the institutions or agencies that appear in the film are associated with it in any way, nor have approved its contents […] certain events and characters in the film have been dramatized”
Despite the fact that the contents of Megalodon were almost entirely made up, the program went on to become the most-watched Shark Week special to date, garnering at least 4.8 million viewers. This isn’t particularly surprising – Animal Planet, one of Discovery’s sister stations, drew in comparable success after airing an equally fake “documentary” titled Mermaids: The Body Found in 2012.
Unfortunately, Megalodon had some lasting negative repercussions; an online follow-up poll revealed that a whopping 73% of audiences were supposedly convinced that megalodon still roamed the ocean2. This, too, is fairly unsurprising. As seen with persisting rumors of lemming suicide en masse rooted in Walt Disney’s highly dramatized 1958 nature documentary White Wilderness3, bogus information can linger as fact for decades so long as the initial source seems trustworthy enough.
As you might expect, there was an outcry from those who noted the suspicious disclaimers and poorly rendered CGI. Discovery Channel executive Michael Sorenson gave the following statement, deflecting all responsibility for the hoax:
“With a whole week of Shark Week programming ahead of us, we wanted to explore the possibilities of Megalodon. It’s one of the most debated shark discussions of all time, can Megalodon exist today? It’s Ultimate Shark Week fantasy. The stories have been out there for years and with 95% of the ocean unexplored, who really knows?”
In 2015, after yet another piece of docufiction titled Megalodon: The New Evidence faced yet another wave of backlash, Discovery’s then-president Rich Ross promised to cut “fake” programming out of future lineups.
But just because Discovery took the vow to no longer air outright lies as factual information does not mean that the replacement material provides viewers with a remotely accurate portrait of how sharks behave or benefit underwater ecosystems. At its best, recent Shark Weeks have provided the sort of cotton candy content that actively bores holes through your brain, such as:
Great Gold vs. Great White, a 2017 special marketed as a race between Olympic gold medalist Michael Phelps and a great white shark. Much to viewers’ displeasure, the program actually featured Phelps swimming 100 meters alongside a computer-generated shark (albeit one that moved at a speed based on existing scientific data on shark speed)
A variety of shows featuring celebrities and reality show stars inexplicably and uncomfortably diving with sharks, all of which could probably be condensed down to 10-minute Youtube videos but instead are painfully stretched to about quadruple that length. Think Guy Fieri, the cast of Jackass, William Shatner, etc.
My personal favorites (conceptually speaking) are Shaq Does Shark Week and Shaq Attack, because they back up my long-standing theory that if Shaq can be shoehorned into a brand or product, he will be.
Multiple installments of Sharkadellic Summer, a truly baffling program that consists of rapper Snoop Dogg narrating footage of sharks chosen seemingly at random, void of any connecting theme.
In the same vein, clip shows a la America’s Funniest Home Videos composed of (supposedly) viral shark videos.
While vapid, this type of programming is pretty harmless, and for the most part, not actively dishonest in its intentions. But there’s an insidious side to Shark Week programming that bolsters negative (and largely inaccurate) shark stereotypes that conservationists have actively battled for years.
There are a plethora of what I’ll call “face-off” shows4: Jaws vs. Kraken, Pigs vs. Shark, Jaws vs. The Blob (?), Shark-Croc Showdown, Sharks vs Dolphins: Face-Off, Bear5 vs. Shark, Tyson6 vs. Jaws. The list is seemingly endless. This year’s Shark Week will feature Shark vs. Snake: Battle of the Bites and Jaws vs. The Meg. A huge percentage of programs include the word Jaws, clearly referencing the seminal thriller featuring a hyper-exaggerated portrait of a man-eating shark. In fact, a peer-reviewed content analysis spanning thirty-two years of Shark Week documentaries found that about 42% of available titles used negative verbiage to describe sharks, while 73% used fear-mongering language over the course of the program7.
There’s no denying that sharks are formidable carnivores that have inspired fear and curiosity in humankind for centuries. But Discovery consistently goes a step further than that when actively making the decision to create titles like Great White Serial Killers or Tiger Shark Invasion or Monster Mako: Perfect Predator. They suggest that sharks are malevolent creatures, capable of premeditation and eager to destroy anything in their path for sport rather than survival.
Which, it should go without saying, is a ridiculous accusation to direct at a fish.
Furthermore, a startling percentage of Shark Week specifically revolves around sharks attacking people. Shots of scarlet billows spreading are littered between testimonies from surfers short a limb or two. In reality, there’s insurmountable evidence that sharks rarely attack humans. For instance, in 2022, there were just 57 unprovoked8 shark attacks, only five of which resulted in fatalities. Because sharks very rarely actually consume human victims, it’s believed that most attacks that aren’t made strictly in self-defense are accidental or exploratory. Out of 400+ species of shark, only three species are responsible for the majority of recorded deaths: the bull shark, the tiger shark, and the great white shark9.
At this point, it should come as no surprise to learn that almost all of Shark Week’s programming revolves around the three species deadliest to humans. And while a surprisingly significant number of shark attack survivors hold no ill will toward sharks (and are often the first to advocate for marine conservation initiatives), it’s almost never mentioned over the course of shark bite specials that the chances of beachgoers actually being bitten are one in several million.
These dramatizations demonizing sharks are particularly troubling because tens of millions of sharks are actively killed10 by people each year at a rate that far outpaces their ability to reproduce. In 2021, scientific journal Nature reported that shark and ray populations have decreased by 71% over the past half-decade. Without sharks, the unanimous consensus holds that oceanic ecosystems would be thrown into complete turmoil, resulting in the loss of everything from coral reef habitats to the quahogs New Englanders use for clam chowder.
I realize that I am far from the first to take note of the degradation of “educational” cable channels like Discovery, Animal Planet, History, National Geographic, and TLC. Earlier this month, a scathing GQ profile11 on Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav described the contents of the channel as “reality slop”. Nor am I suggesting that Discovery’s portrayal of sharks is the sole factor driving dwindling shark populations.
But perhaps now – through the lens of an artificial televised holiday celebrating carnage, bloodshed, and overinflated monsters – is a better time than ever to examine the pseudo-factual cesspool we’re all drowning in and consider the long-term consequences it presents.
“Our programming is for what we call the lifelong learners,” stated Discovery’s founder and chairman John Hendricks days before the channel’s June 1985 launch. In those early days, Hendricks’ concept was straightforward and pure – a cable channel dedicated to airing documentaries. The idea spanned back nearly a decade, to his days as a history student at the University of Alabama in the 1970s. Tasked with handling catalogs of documentaries as part of a work-study program, he fell in love with the genre and lamented that most films weren’t especially accessible to the general public. When the 80s rolled around and no one had yet created a documentary-based cable television channel in the United States, Hendricks took out a second mortgage on his home and took matters into his own hands.
Initially, Hendricks believed that Discovery would attract a limited, but sophisticated, audience. At the start, the channel sourced its educational programming from other established broadcasters around the world (such as the BBC). About 75% of that early content had never aired in the United States prior to Discovery’s inception. To Hendricks surprise, these informative, high-quality documentaries on everything from pop science to ancient history were very well-recieved. Within three years of launch, Discovery enjoyed approximately 32 million subscribers across America12. As Discovery built momentum in the late 1980s, the company deemed it necessary to begin airing its own original content to supplement its collection of imported documentaries.
Almost immediately after that decision was made, Shark Week was born.
The mythos around the special is hazy. Some claim that the first inklings were scrawled on a bar napkin by a drunken Discovery exec. Others say that the idea came from Hendricks himself. What we do know is that from the beginning, as evident in this 1985 New York Times blurb, Discovery looked to the Public Broadcasting Service for inspiration. And at the time, one of PBS’s highest-rated broadcasts of all time – simply titled The Sharks – centered around sharks. Furthermore, Steven Spielberg’s Jaws13 was still very much a part of the cultural zeitgeist. Though 1987’s Jaws: The Revenge was universally panned for atrocious acting, a nonsensical plot, and comical visual effects, the fact that it still managed to gross over $20 million dollars at the box office revealed that sharks very much still generated fear and fascination among American audiences.
Whatever the catalyst ultimately was, Discovery set to work creating ten shark-themed documentaries. With beachgoing vacationers in mind, Discovery decided to air the specials consecutively over the course of one week during the summer of 1988. According to legend, Discovery viewership doubled during that one-week window. Thus, Shark Week became an annual tradition, with Benjamin Freed of the Washingtonian describing it as one of the “greatest low-risk, high-reward moves in broadcasting history”.
Shark Week appears to have been a much more subdued affair throughout the 80s and 90s. Little from the earliest iterations of the event is readily available today, but surviving schedules and archived specials show that programming was much more sparse and far less sensationalist than what we’ve come to expect14. Nevertheless, Shark Week played a significant role in attracting viewers for the fledgling channel during the stagnant summer months that had little to offer outside of reruns.
But in the mid-1990s, Discovery stumbled upon something that would change the landscape of nature documentary forever: Steve Irwin.
On October 25, 1996, Discovery Channel aired a two-hour special featuring the Australian wildlife conservationist and his new bride, Terri Raines Irwin, wrangling and wrestling crocodiles on their honeymoon. Instantaneously, viewers were attracted to his infectious charisma and evident passion for protecting animals. But what captivated people more so than anything else was his unconventional, hands-on approach to handling creatures capable of killing him.
Psychologist Dolf Zillman once described suspense as an “acute, fearful apprehension about deplorable events that threatens liked protagonists”, which perfectly describes what many viewers experienced as Irwin toyed with mother nature. Over the course of his studies on suspense and media consumption, Zillman developed something called the excitation-transfer theory. In layman’s terms, the theory proposes that “leftover” emotional and physiological arousal stemming from one situation can linger and amplify our emotional reaction to a subsequent situation. In the context of this theory, Zillman suggested that when a threat is resolved and suspense dissipates, our negative feelings can convert to euphoria.
These theories were developed in an attempt to understand why people actively enjoy watching scary movies like Jaws, but the same logic can aid in understanding why viewers enjoyed watching Steve Irwin’s docuseries as well. His general exuberance and the goofy smile that plastered his face made him uber-likable – and when you like someone, you can’t help but feel a bit apprehensive about the toothy 20-foot saltwater crocodile he shares a screen with. And when the tension broke and that crocodile inevitably left him intact, viewers undoubtedly felt a sense of satisfaction or relief (whether or not they were actively conscious of it).
Why is the emergence of Steve Irwin and the psychological phenomena of excitation-transfer relevant to Shark Week? Because after seeing the quirky conservationist’s schtick and observing how people reacted to him, Discovery realized that Steve Irwin and his willingness to flirt with danger was a godsend and a goldmine. Suddenly, wildlife documentary was not just a noble endeavor to educate curious viewers – it was something that, if handled correctly, could turn a massive profit.
Irwin was a natural fit for Animal Planet, a newly founded Discovery/BBC Worldwide venture that debuted just two months before the initial honeymoon special aired. By the spring of 1997, Steve and Terri Irwin had a show of their own in The Crocodile Hunter. The show blurred the tenuous lines between reality television and documentary, and ultimately The Crocodile Hunter served as a prototype for the unscripted docudramas that would eventually comprise the majority of Discovery Inc.’s programming.
For nearly a decade, Irwin helped cement Animal Planet (and by extension Discovery) as a fixture in the households of millions, essentially acting as the channel’s de facto mascot. Whether he was conducting an interview with Conan O’Brien or being parodied on South Park, Irwin acted as a living, breathing advertisement eternally proselytizing that Discovery’s brand of educational programming, neatly packaged with a jolt of adrenaline.
Unfortunately, in September 2006 Irwin was mortally wounded by a short-tail stingray while filming a documentary titled Ocean’s Deadliest. Two months later, David Zaslav succeeded Judith McHale as Discovery’s CEO.
From the start, Zaslav expressed an interest in expanding the company beyond the confines of television, and he saw potential in promising new series such as Dirty Jobs, Deadliest Catch, and MythBusters that straddled the line between information and entertainment. But without Discovery’s most profitable and recognizable brand to date, how could it possibly reach its leader’s lofty and nebulous goals?
Steve Irwin was a one-of-a-kind, uniquely lovable personality brimming with passion. It became immediately evident that he could not be easily replaced. What could be easily replicated, however, was the tension between human and animal that made the show such a universal hit.
This is where Shark Week comes in.
Clearly catching on to The Crocodile Hunter’s recipe for success, Shark Week’s contents had begun to morph before Zaslav’s arrival. Slowly but surely, titles like Swift, Smart, and Deadly and Sharks: Are They Hunting Us? entered the broadcasting roster. Jarring jump cuts and close-ups of thrashing teeth became increasingly common fare, as can be seen from the opening shots of the Shark Roulette special that aired in 2003.
But from 2007 onward, use fearsome footage and negative language to imply that sharks are savage monsters that take pleasure in inflicting grievous injury amplified exponentially. Marine biologist Jonathan Davies has even claimed that Discovery producers, in a truly sociopathic moment, tried to convince the researcher to purposely allow a shark to bite into him during the production of a 2013 special titled Voodoo Sharks.
Whether these particular practices should be labeled as simple half-truths or outright deception doesn’t matter – they’re ultimately the starting points of a slippery slope that ends in the creation of deliberate falsehoods like Megalodon. If you’re already able to justify stitching together shark footage together to create a more violent visual narrative, what stops you from going a step further by splicing an expert’s words to build a more compelling story? In the 2010s, shows like History’s Ancient Aliens profited off of embellishing grains of truth with pseudoscience and conspiracy theories. So long as some kernel of authenticity remained, why shouldn’t Discovery and Shark Week do the same as their competitors?
Though years have passed since Discovery vowed to stop delving knee-deep into cryptozoological speculation, to say that Shark Week is now committed to unadulterated truth would be inaccurate. Rather, Megalodon backlash simply adjusted the acceptable fact-to-fiction ratio. Over the course of Zaslav’s ongoing push to shift Discovery from a “cable company” to a “content company”, the amount of Shark Week programming of a hyper-violent nature has skyrocketed – despite all of the empirical evidence available to the contrary.
That is not to say that there are activists and scientists acting in good faith and attempting to use Shark Week’s massive platform as a podium to increase shark awareness. For instance, 2021’s 45-hour lineup included Fin, a documentary by Eli Roth chronicling the impacts of commercial fishing on global shark populations. And those moments of sincerity should be applauded, rare as they may be. But the fact that executives chose to make Fin a Discovery+ exclusive while airing Jaws during a coveted primetime slot reveals a sinister truth born from short-sighted corporate greed.
So, over the next week as you’re bombarded by paid Instagram promotions of Jason Momoa skipping along scenic beaches or pleas to tune into something called Belly of the Beast: Feeding Frenzy at 8pm EST, remember this: so long as we stay hungry, Discovery is more willing than ever to continue serving killer shark fantasies.
And, if we aren’t careful, those horror stories may just damn the very animals that have so faithfully kept them afloat.
In fact, what we know about the megalodon suggests that it almost certainly couldn’t survive deep below the sea. Though a number of factors probably contributed to its extinction, cooling temperatures and lower sea levels (and subsequent loss of shallow breeding grounds) are time and time again blamed for its disappearance. Fossil records show that the sharks either could not or would not expand their range to colder waters, suggesting that they may have lacked the modified circulatory system that allows modern relatives like the great white shark to survive lower temperatures. Even if the megalodon did have the circulatory system necessary to keep it warm, the shark would need to constantly eat in order to heat its colossal 100,000 lb body.
Whatever the case, all of these factors suggest that megalodon would likely not retreat to deep waters, where temperatures consistently hover between 0-4°C and food can, in many cases, be scarce.
Being an online poll, these results should obviously be taken with a grain of salt.
According to nature filmmaker Bill Carrick, the crew of White Wilderness constructed an elaborate “arctic” set alongside Calgary’s Bow River. They had children from Manitoba (where lemmings actually live) collect live lemmings for 25 cents a body, transported the rodents south to the set, then placed the rodents on makeshift turntables to disorient them before hurling them over cliffs and into the water, where they eventually drowned. White Wilderness made the claim that foolish lemmings frequently and instinctively leap off of cliffs and into the Arctic Ocean. In reality, while lemmings can swim and have been known to drown in attempts to reach new resources, groups of lemmings only migrate when population density becomes too great or food resources have been exhausted.
National Geographic loves shark battle shows as well: they boast titles such as Bullshark vs. Hammerhead, Shark vs. Predator, Shark vs. Tuna, Sharks vs Dolphins: Bahamas Battleground for Sharkfest, a month-long special meant to rival Shark Week.
(As in Grylls.)
(As in Mike.)
The methodology used to determine whether a word was negative came from citing scores for valence and arousal on the list of Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW). In addition, researchers took into context the construction of titles and phrases that used inherently neutral words that created negative connotations when combined (i.e. “Rogue Shark”)
The Florida Museum of Natural History’s International Shark Attack File defines an unprovoked attack as “incidents in which a bite on a live human occurs in the shark’s natural habitat with no human provocation of the shark”. In 2022 there were 31 additional provoked attacks, which occur when a human initiates interaction with a shark (such as a fisherman cutting a shark loose from a net, or a scuba diver trying to touch or feed a shark in the wild).
It’s worth noting that not all shark attack victims are able to easily identify the species of their attackers and very well may at times misattribute attacks to familiar species such as the great white. The oceanic whitetip is also thought to have killed a significant number of castaways stranded at sea after accidents, but this is difficult (if not impossible) to confirm.
When I say “actively killed”, that does not include the scores of marine life that are dying because of oceanic pollution.
The article gained significant attention after GQ pulled the story from its website shortly after publication. An archived copy is available to read here.
For reference of how big of a market share 32 million subscribers was, US census data estimates that there were about 44 million cable subscribers total in 1988. In other words, 3 out of every 4 televisions that had cable access had a subscription to Discovery.
I want to acknowledge that Jaws is actually a film adaptation of a book by Peter Benchley, but I think it’s fair to say that the musical score, iconic imagery, and convincing performances of Spielberg’s film were what made it a touchstone for contemporary horrors and thrillers
Though many of the specials from the 80s and 90s are difficult to find, Shark Week’s very first program, Caged in Fear (1988), is available to view on the Internet Archive and provides a taste of what Shark Week used to be.