"Blood in the Water", Sunday Night 9:00pm-11:00pm (re-running Friday Night)

Blood in the Water

Let's face it, as far as basic cable, or even digital plus (whatever the fuck that means) channels, it is difficult to make a case that any channel brings the bad ass at a higher and more consistent rate than the Discovery Channel. Beginning with the well received "I Shouldn't Be Alive" series, the Discovery Channel began to wade into the quality re-enactment scenes to go along with the commentary portions. These were quality re-enactments that were nothing like the awful re-enactments from Unsolved Mysteries or Rescue 911 crap.

Blood in the Water takes this to the next level and consists of roughly 95% actors and 5% stock footage of Great White Sharks fucking stuff up. The program is a recounting, in faux documentary style, of the Shark attacks along the New Jersey coast in the summer of 1916. These are the attacks that led to a book that led to the Spielberg masterpiece "Jaws". In the span of a few weeks in July, five people were attacked by a shark or sharks along the coasts or inlets resulting in four deaths.

According to the program, in 1916, the most well renowned marine biologists were convinced that sharks could not kill and eat people. They claim that as of 1916, not a single shark had killed a single person in the United States, which when you think of it, is absolutely fucking absurd. These "scientists" believed that the only shark hypothetically capable of such actions was a "White Shark" (i.e. Great White Shark) and they only lived in warm tropical waters. Fucking morons.

Even with eye-witness testimony regarding two attacks on crowded beaches within a week of each other, the scientists were skeptical. The other three attacks occurred up a fresh water inlet about a mile and half from the ocean called "Mattawan Creek". The 1916 townspeople freaked out about the "water creature" eating their own, so they did what any other rational 1916 townsperson would do: they shot guns at anything that moved in the water and then tried to use dynamite to kill the shark.

I did not have extremely high hopes for this program because I knew going in that it was 95% dramatized and would lack any hardcore video or analysis of the actual sharks. I was correct. However, in Blood in the Water, they make the audience believe that it was a Great White Shark responsible for all the attacks, even the ones in fresh water. Now this, I have a MAJOR problem with.

There is only one shark who can live freely in the salt water of the ocean and the fresh water of inlets, lakes and rivers. That is the Bull Shark, the most bad ass shark on the planet. They have found Bull Shark's 2000 miles up the Amazon river and as far north up the Mississippi as St. Louis. That's terrifying and awesome. The three people attacked in Mattawan Creek were most likely victims of a Bull Shark, which the program tends to ignore until the last five minutes where they throw out the possibility and that "scientists" disagree.

Fresh Water = Bull Shark. It's that simple. Give the Bull Shark some motherfucking respect.

Anticipated Rating = Oceanic White Tip
Actual Rating = Lemon Shark