Dear Discovery Channel:
As an avid Shark Week fan, I want to tell you how much I enjoy the drama and the "gorefest" that you bring into my living room every summer. The problem is ... the shows are becoming too stagnant for my tastes. I noticed in the credits of the programming, there are a lot of Dr.'s, Ph.D.'s and marine institutes being thanked for their help. I strongly believe that the scientists are holding you back from airing the type of programming that will best educate the public about the role sharks play in the ecosystem. I would suggest Quentin Tarrantino, Wes Craven, M. Night Shyamalan, Rob Zombie or Dick Cheney be consulted for the horrors they create rather than reducing the credibility of actual scientists who need to pimp themselves out to you for a week so they could fund true research the other 51 weeks of the year.
I must admit, I'm impressed with your special effects team. Perhaps when actor Mark Harmon gets around to making the movie Summer School 2: We Have No Class, rather than a tribute to Rick Baker, the F/X guru from the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre film, as done by the characters Chainsaw and Dave in Summer School, Chainsaw and Dave will return to class as guest speakers and the jobs they hold are F/X guys for the Discovery Channel? Basically what I'm asking for is more blood, guts and gore! More! More! More! More! More!
In fact, why do you bother to reproduce a shark attack at all? Hasn't television advanced to the point that we can dispense with re-creations and go for it! C'mon, you know you wanna! That's right ... a LIVE shark attack! No, I don't mean video of an actual attack, I mean LIVE at that moment as it happens like America's Got Talent or American Idol. How's this for an idea? You take the different species of shark that are most often exploited on your shows and you have them compete to savage the flesh of different people you drop into the water. We can study what ethnic groups or genders are more likely to die on a reality TV show about sharks.
Think about it. Your camera angles can capture the drama of a mother who watches her child torn to shreds by a nurse shark or maybe even a dogfish shark? The gut-wrenching facial expresses, followed closely behind by the reality confessional in which the tearful mother can share her innermost (not scripted at all thoughts) about the horror of losing her only child to a vicious maneater that was only doing what you forced it to do. Maybe you could draw out the drama and make every commercial break a cliffhanger, just long enough that we can witness all 5 stages of the grieving process happen within an hour segment?
The sharks on the other hand could have a ceremony in which you give out the "final remora" for those who get to stay in the tank. Every episode, when a shark gets voted off for not being convincing enough in its attack, it will get tossed into a big bowl of soup. I'm sure the Campbell's company would love to sponsor that. Shark fin soup! Mmmm ... mmm ... good!
