Discovery’s Shark Week has been delivering seven days of shark-filled TV each summer season for greater than thirty years now, however this summer season of the 2025 TV schedule actually stands out on the shark entrance due to the fiftieth anniversary of Jaws. The anniversary was nearly precisely one month earlier than Shark Week acquainted face Paul de Gelder took the display for his Survive a Shark Assault particular, so I seized my alternative throughout Discovery’s press day to ask for his tackle the beloved movie that didn’t fairly precisely painting nice white shark conduct.
Shark Week could not have recruited a greater main man for Survive a Shark Assault than Paul de Gelder, as he fairly actually has survived a shark assault. He misplaced a hand and a leg after being attacked by a bull shark, and he put his data to make use of on this specific Discovery particular. Once I spoke with de Gelder for Shark Week 2025, which kicked off with Tom Bergeron’s Dancing with Sharks (to blended reactions from viewers), he weighed in on how Jaws has affected widespread opinions about sharks:
I really like Jaws. I feel it is probably the greatest films ever made. And my concern just isn’t about Jaws the film or some other shark film. It is in folks that may’t inform actuality from fiction. I feel we needs to be extra involved about these people. Jaws got here out in 1975. There wasn’t any web, we did not have telephones, cell phones and all that stuff. We simply sort of relied on what the media might feed us within the native newspaper or the information. Now we’ve got the wealth of the world’s data inside a couple of keystrokes.
It seems like Paul de Gelder would agree with CinemaBlend rating the nightmare-inducing Jaws as probably the greatest horror films of all time! He identified that the world was a really totally different place again in 1975, and director Steven Spielberg himself shared his remorse that Jaws led to the mass killing of real-life sharks (that are far more purposeful than the film’s nice white). These days, because the assault survivor identified, it is crucial to inform actuality from fiction relating to these animals.
None of that is to say that Paul de Gelder believes that almost all Jaws followers do not discern actuality from fiction, since there are extra assets in 2025 than 1975… though he did admit that there is a technique that sharks actually aren’t serving to themselves relating to their reputations. He went on:
We’re not as singleminded in our info sources, and so I feel everyone seems to be somewhat wiser. I feel they know that Jaws wasn’t actual. And so we’re attempting to interrupt down a number of the myths which might be unfold by the newspapers now and the information articles speaking about ‘man-eating killer off the coast ready to stalk your youngsters’ and all that. The sharks do not do us any favors both. They seem to be a fairly unhealthy PR consumer. You rise up for them, you speak about how they’re important and so they’re not tremendous harmful, after which they go and chew somebody. Again to sq. one.
As an annual viewer of Shark Week who additionally loves Jaws to the purpose of as soon as watching it whereas en path to an ocean seaside trip, I really like Paul de Gelder’s tackle sharks as “a reasonably unhealthy PR consumer.” Whereas shark assaults on people are fairly uncommon, they make very large headlines after they do occur, and Jaws immortalized the concept of a rogue shark occurring a killing spree.
But when de Gelder might go from being attacked by a bull shark to selling shark safety and conservation 12 months after 12 months on Shark Week, certainly we will all go the additional mile to do not forget that Jaws is fiction, shark assaults being uncommon is the fact, and we will undoubtedly simply get pleasure from “probably the greatest films ever made.”
In the event you missed Paul de Gelder’s Survive a Shark Assault when it aired on Discovery, you may stream it now with a Max subscription in addition to different Shark Week installments of 2025. This was solely one in all a number of specials that includes de Gelder this week, with others together with Air Jaws: The Hunt for Colossus, Black Mako of the Abyss, and the upcoming Bull Shark Showdown on July 25. Shark Week will wrap this 12 months on July 26.