Should Television Blur the Lines Between Fact and Fiction?

As my post earlier this week should indicate, I am a fan of Discovery Channel's Shark Week. Sure it recycles a lot of the same show year after year, but its still fascinating to learn and be reminded of what's out there in the ocean.

But this year, I (and many others) had out excitement deflated thanks to what Discovery decided to air as its first new program of Shark Week: a "documentary" about Megalodon. Now, if you aren't aware, Megalodon is a prehistoric giant shark, so I thought "Cool, they're going to do a show similar to documentaries that use paleontologists and research to help recreate the Megalodon and show us how it lived, what it hunted and maybe how it became extinct." No. That's not what I got.

What I did get was a piece of fiction that tried to pretend like it was real about how Megalodon was still alive. It was obvious at first that this was not real from the beginning - featuring "found" footage of a ship going down after an apparent shark attack. I could have stopped there, but I didn't. I wanted the Discovery Channel to redeem itself, but it never did. It just got worse, with bad CGI and even worse photoshopped pictures from a whale bitten in half to an apparent secret Nazi picture of a giant shark swimming along side a U-Boat.

But if I knew it was fake right away, why am I so mad?

Because frankly, I think this is irresponsible.

I understand that the "mockumentary" is a genre, but they never try and pretend they are presenting facts. They are fiction being presented in a similar style. This was fiction trying to pretend it was fact. If that wasn't the goal, why did the disclaimer (which came at the end, not the beginning) show fly by so quickly it was just a flash of tiny white text in the bottom of the screen?

I am not the only one mad at this. Just google megalodon and the only results you get are essays and reviews about how mad people are about this. People are mad for being duped. People are mad that Shark Week was tainted with speculative fiction. And most of all, people are mad that Shark Week, which often serves to inform people that sharks are not man-eaters and should be respected, not feared, aired a two hour special that was based in fear and not facts. This "documentary" had the feeling of a bad horror film - that someone was going to get eaten at some point. That isn't what Shark Week is about.

This certainly isn't the first time this has happened, and its a growning trend as networks like Discovery Channel and History Channel look for ways to gain bigger audiences. Look back a couple months at the flack Animal Planet got for airing a similar fake documentaries about mermaids. Didn't Discovery Channel realize something similar would happen?

I guess I just wonder about what the responsibility of these networks is when it comes to airing these types of shows. I guess I wonder if my anger and disappointment is validated.

For other discussions of the Megalodon special, see these links (not to mention a ton more I did not link):

http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2013/08/06/discovery-channel-defends-it-decision-to-air-dramatized-megalodon/

http://gawker.com/shark-week-opens-with-fake-megalodon-documentary-1028053485

http://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/blog/2013/08/05/shark-week-megalodon-fake-discovery-channel/

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/entertainment/2013/08/shark-week-fans-deserve-better-what-discovery-feeding-them/68028/