The Shark Film Office

Yes, there was more shark stuff going on during Shark Week . Not willing to fully step on their neighbors’ toes nor put that much money into competing against them, Nat Geo Wild loves to promote themselves as having the “#2 week for sharks” in television. SharkFest has been matching up against Shark Week for a few years now, and it is decidedly a lesser beast in terms of number of shows. If you don’t count previews and recaps (and I don’t) Shark Week tossed out 16 new hours of shark documentaries for 2017. SharkFest has just four. But the quality, thanks to being part of National Geographic, is of equal measure to anything on Discovery (some might even argue more quality, but I see them being pretty equal, considering that some of the same people work on shows for both networks). Where Nat Geo Wild has Discovery beat is in being self-effacing. Discovery likes to use humor  to talk about their shows , especially on Shark After Dark  or in their promos using Seal the s...

OK, I didn’t get to watch most of Shark Week last week on television. Because it is easier to take notes right on my computer, I chose to watch the bulk of Shark Week on Discovery Channel’s online site. But where it made one part of the project easier to do, I had to deal with the fact that I couldn’t easily skip the commercials like on the DVR had I watched everything in the living room or bedroom. And so, stuck by choice with seeing each episode online, I was forced to sit through the requisite amount of commercial breaks. This might have been fine, but it also meant that I was forced into a couple hundred viewings of the trailer for The Hitman’s Bodyguard . This gave me great exposure to a film of which I was not even aware of in the least before Shark Week came along. To say that I have now been driven to madness to the degree that there is not a chance that I will see the film when it comes out in mid-August. Even with Sam Jackson, Ryan Reynolds and Gary Oldman, there is l...

[This is Part II of a three-part recap of Shark Week 2016. To read the introduction and Part I, click here .] Tuesday, June 28 Wrath of a Great White Serial Killer  --  As I mentioned in the prologue to this recap of   Shark Week 2016 , I disdain documentary titles that play off the shark’s image as nothing more than an unthinking eating machine or lurking monster. Equating them to a singularly human form of predatory slaughter is even worse. This series of docs is the worst offender in my mind, hosted by Brandon McMillan, who comes off (to me at least) as the John Walsh of marine biology, driven by personal near-tragedy to pursue the purpose behind a particular series of shark attacks. The lead case of interest here is a non-fatal (he says “nearly fatal”) great white attack on his friend, surfer Kenny Doudt, off the coast of Oregon in 1979. Kenny finally drowned off the same coast while surfing in 2010, but I don’t see Brandon trying to figure out why the same water t...