Why viewers continue to eat up Shark Week
The Discovery Channel kicks off its annual Shark Week on Sunday, a sure sign that we’re in the thick of summer and a reminder, yet again, that fear, often sensationalized for TV, is a constant hook in the broadcast business.
Shark Week “is our Super Bowl,” Howard Swartz, Discovery’s senior vice president of production and development, told Variety magazine not long ago.
Indeed, hold the remote and pass the popcorn, sharks, typically with great whites as the headliners among the 500-plus species across the planet, again take Discovery’s center stage.
The summertime tradition has been running since 1988. It took sharks a few million years finally to land their first big gig, and 35 years later, they’re not about to be chased from the cable TV waters.
In the local charter fishing boat business, all shark programming is good, according to Wendy Sears of Mass Bay Guides, a busy six-boat operation out of Scituate Harbor.
Shows such as “Wicked Tuna” and the Shark Week brand, she said, often are front-of mind reasons customers relate when signing on for shark fishing.
“Kids love that stuff,” Sears said the other day, referring to the myriad TV shows. “Anything to do with fishing and the ocean and all that kind of stuff, for the younger kids coming up into this amazing, crazy world of ours, it’s all good.”
Surprisingly, noted Sears, it’s the family crowd that’s usually the most interested in booking one of MBG’s 10hour shark fishing adventures.
“Yep, families, believe it or not . . . and usually families with teenage boys,” she said. “I think [the boys] are just interested in battling a species of something — and I think boys that like the ocean are curious. There’s whales out there, too, and usually you’ll see those when you’re going for sharks. It’s quite an event.”
The cost of a 10-hour trip, for a party of six, typically runs upward of $2,000, taxes and tips included. July and August are the peak months, but the sharks remain off the Cape well into fall until the water chills.
In recent years, in large part because of the resurgence in the gray seal population, especially on the outer reaches of Cape Cod, there has been a sizable uptick in great white activity. The seals, rich in fat and relatively easy prey for the voracious predators in open water, were hunted nearly to extinction around here through the 1800s and well into the 20th century, until the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act set the stage for their recovery.
“The new café just opened off Cape Cod,” Dr. Greg Skomal, the Bay State’s leading shark expert, said during one of his TED Talks, explaining what persuaded the great whites to swim north and summer off the Cape.
Like the seals, the MMPA protects the great whites, in part helping to boost their numbers, as well. If caught, they must be released immediately. According to Sears, they’ve been spotted, but never hooked, on Mass Bay Guides excursions.
Up on Cape Ann, Collin MacKenzie captains a boat out of Gloucester for Karen Lynn Charters. He has yet to spot a great white in those waters.
“But we don’t have the big number of seals that they do on the Cape,” said MacKenzie. “It’s a different story down there.”
In general, said MacKenzie, “all the talk” around Shark Week “is good for the business.”
But for his part, MacKenzie would rather hook a bluefin tuna, the largest of which can weigh north of 1,000 pounds and demand enough cash at market to cover a customer’s costs.
“The tuna is just a better fighter than most of the sharks,” he said, ranking the bluefin ahead of species such as mako shark, blue shark, and thresher shark, all of which are common in our part of the Atlantic. “It can take almost the whole day to bring in a tuna.”
Shark Week action begins Sunday at 8 p.m. with “Belly of the Beast: Feeding Frenzy,” followed by “Jaws vs. the Meg,” and then “Serial Killer: Red Sea Feeding Frenzy.” Discovery will broadcast 20 one-hour blocks over seven days, wrapping with Saturday’s 9 p.m. grand finale, “Megasharks of Dangerous Reef.” In another time, we might have expected “Abbott and Costello Meet
Son of Jaws,” but . . .
Four of the Shark Week episodes have the word “Jaws” as part of the title. “Jaws,” the smash movie about a man-eating great white, sited on fictitious Amity Island, was filmed on Martha’s Vineyard and released in 1975.
At the time, only three years after the institution of the MMPA, great whites weren’t anywhere close to the Vineyard. No one needed a bigger boat north of, say, the Carolinas. By then, the last human fatality because of a shark attack in the area had been in 1936 in Buzzards Bay (Mattapoisett). The next wouldn’t be until 2018, when a great white killed Arthur Medici, 26, of Revere, as he boogie-boarded at Newcomb Hollow Beach in Wellfleet.
Earlier this month, National Geographic, for the 11th year, rolled out its highly popular SharkFest programming across its media platforms. It was 10 years ago this month that the first “Sharknado” movie appeared on TV, soon to be followed by a handful of sequels.
When it comes to sharks, be it scientific fact, pulp fiction, or flat-out comedy, we just can’t seem to get enough.
“People make bucket-list trips from Europe to catch a tuna here,” said Sears as she waited one recent afternoon for Mass Bay Guides boats to return from their daily run. “The same for sharks. It’s crazy.”