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" The ratings for Discovery Channel&amp;#039;s Shark Week have been released, and they are huge. They&amp;#039;re bigger than huge. They&amp;#039;re staggering. Its opening show, Megalodon, attracted 4.8 million viewers. That&amp;#039;s nearly double the finale of Mad Men&amp;#039;s most recent season. Even its bizarre late-night talk show, which I kind of love, Shark After Dark, beat out The Daily Show, beat out The Colbert Report, beat out Chelsea Lately hosted by Lindsay Lohan for chrissakes, to become the most-watched show in its slot on television. It&amp;#039;s bizarre. Or rather it&amp;#039;s not that bizarre. Because Shark Week is actually pretty near perfect television. Once you start watching, you wake up three hours later having watched the same thing over and over again with no idea how or why.  Megalodon, the opener, provoked something of a storm of controversy among people who really have lowered the bar on what it takes to get them outraged. They&amp;#039;re upset because there are no fifty-foot sharks alive anymore, there is no such thing as &amp;quot;power chumming,&amp;quot; and there are no scientists investigating the possible existence of fish that have been extinct for a million and a half years. The concept of a mockumentary has apparently never occured to significant portions of the Discovery Channel audience. I, for one, find it sort of charming that people can still get offended by the idea that the line between fact and fiction has been blurred. The controversy is supposedly about the misrepresentation of sharks. But the truth is that all of Shark Week is a vast misrepresentation of sharks. Every single show operates on this premise: Look at this awesome killer. Any guesses as to how many people die on average per year from sharks? The answer is five. Icicles kill a hundred people a year in Russia alone. But there is no &amp;quot;Icicle Week,&amp;quot; somehow. The real story of sharks is that we&amp;#039;re massacring them in horrific numbers, mostly for a rather delicious kind of soup. Unfortunately, that doesn&amp;#039;t make very good television. Killer sharks are the perfect form of nature as entertainment: They look scary, but they probably aren&amp;#039;t going to hurt you. I find it hard to blame Discovery Channel for our inherent narrative prejudices. Megalodon is by no means the best show of the week. Voodoo Shark, about sharks in Louisiana, is relatively awesome. But frankly they could run twenty-four hours a day of Air Jaws \u2014 which is mostly repeats from previous Shark Weeks \u2014 and I would watch it. It&amp;#039;s nothing but Great White Sharks breaching out of the water as they take down seals. But to see them come out of the water, with the pulsing music and the deep-throated man talking over it \u2014 if that&amp;#039;s on television, you&amp;#039;re not going to be watching anything else. On 30 Rock, Tracy Jordan&amp;#039;s demented wisdom was to live every week as if it&amp;#039;s Shark Week. And Tracy Jordan is right: A monster emerges from the depths, we survive, it leaves, we get to watch the whole thing. What more do you want from television? PLUS: Read More Stephen Marche on The Culture Blog &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; Follow The Culture Blog on RSS and on Twitter at @ESQCulture. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a24224/shark-week-awesome/>