Discovery’s 37th Shark Week: Its Wildest Missions Yet

Most people pale at the mere thought of sharing the ocean with sharks. But for the stars of Discovery’s Shark Week, being circled, charged at, or even bitten by one is just another day on the job.

The 37th annual installment of the longest-running cable TV event in history began on Sunday, and features some of its most daring operations yet. Stars Paul De Gelder, Kinga Phillips, Kendyl Berna and Forrest Galante combine skills and straight luck as they dive into the belly of the beast to fascinate, educate and thrill Shark Week fans everywhere.

De Gelder, a Shark Week veteran of over a decade, has built a career on surviving the unthinkable. While working as a Navy bomb disposal diver in 2009, De Gelder was attacked by a bull shark, losing both his right hand and leg to the animal. 

“I never blamed the shark, because I had a very dangerous job and so many things could have gone wrong,” De Gelder told Decider. “At least this way, I got a cool story, and I even developed a whole career out of it.”

This year’s programming, however, struck De Gelder particularly close to home. In How to Survive a Shark Attack, which premieres Tuesday, July 22 at 9 p.m. ET, De Gelder repeatedly puts himself into common shark attack scenarios, strategically allowing the sharks to bite specially made prosthetic limbs off of him.

“We’ve never actually shown people what happens when a shark attacks you, so I think this is a very important show,” De Gelder said. “I think my mom is gonna kill me or have a heart attack, one of the two, but I’m very proud of the show.”

The seasoned hosts put themselves at risk for science, education and awareness. In Attack of the Devil Shark, journalist and conservationist Kinga Phillips faces a harrowing encounter with a large tiger shark. 

“There are certain situations in [Attack of the Devil Shark] where I went to bed that night and I was like, ‘oh wow, that could have gone so badly,’” Phillips told Decider. “In the moment, you handle it, but later when you process it in your head, you think wow, we really kind of got lucky there. And the reality is, sometimes it is luck.”

Forrest Galante, another long-time host on Shark Week and Animal Planet, describes why the program has become such a cultural icon.

“We came up as creatures evolutionarily without being at the top of the food chain. Now we’ve placed ourselves [there] due to modern technology, but that fascination with what it was like to not be at the top never goes away,” Galante explained. “If you add the dimension of getting into a totally foreign environment, like the ocean, it’s a whole nother mind-blowing thing. You might as well be going to Pandora in Avatar. It immerses you in an entirely different world.”

The experts want people to know that while sharks are generally misunderstood, it’s important to stay vigilant. Thanks to successful conservation measures, shark populations are recovering from over 70 percent global decimation. This, along with increased recreational water activities among humans, means interactions between sharks and people are on the rise. The experts emphasized that people must educate themselves about shark behavior to avoid danger when sharing the ocean with them. 

“If you were gonna go on a safari in Africa, you would need to understand that you can’t just go walking through a pride of lions or walking around the savanna at night,” Phillips said. “So that kind of education and information with any kind of predator where you’re gonna have a lot of interactions between humans and them is very important.”

Kendyl Berna, a documentary filmmaker and marine biologist featured in Shark Week this year, said there’s still so much we don’t know.

“The first time I did [Shark Week], I was like, how are we gonna keep this going? And then I was like, oh my gosh, there’s still so many questions,” Berna said. “That’s why we’re able to do 20 episodes of Shark Week every year, because there’s just endless amounts of shark science that you can do.”

Dive into Shark Week every night this week (7/20-7/26) on Discovery+ or HBO Max to see the shocking, adrenaline-inducing and captivating programs for yourself.

“We’re actually doing this stuff, and none of it is staged,” Phillips said. “We’re in the water with them, and nature’s unexpected. You never know what’s gonna happen.”

How To Watch Shark Week

You can of course tune into the Discovery Channel, but if you want to stream everything that’s on Discovery from this year and year’s past, your best bet is a subscription to HBO Max.

If you’re new to HBO Max, you can sign up for as low as $9.99/month with ads, but an ad-free subscription will cost $16.99/month.

If you want to stream even more and save a few bucks a month while you’re at it, we recommend subscribing to one of the discounted Disney+ Bundles with Hulu and HBO Max. With ads, the bundle costs $16.99/month and without ads, $29.99/month.