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 have kept quiet about it until now, but since this is my last section of Shark Week reviews for 2017, I need to say something. There is something going on with Shark Week that is really off this year. This is the actual 30th anniversary of Shark Week right now, but Discovery Channel is pretending that it isn't. That's right... 2017 is the 30th straight year of Shark Week , and no one is celebrating until next year. Except for me, that is. Now, hear me out, because the details don't lie: The 20th anniversary celebration and DVD set for  Shark Week  came out in 2007. The 25th anniversary celebration and DVD set for  Shark Week  came out in 2012. (You can still find reviews online from those years for both DVD sets, and those reviews are dated.) So, using that knowledge, and counting 5 more years, when should the 30th anniversary be? Can you even count, Discovery Channel? Because you have already announced that 2018 is the 30th anniversary, but when you ai...

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...