Discovery's Shark Week has been delivering seven days of shark-filled TV every summer for more than thirty years now, but this summer of the 2025 TV schedule really stands out on the shark front thanks to the 50th anniversary of Jaws. The anniversary was almost exactly one month before Shark Week familiar face Paul de Gelder took the screen for his How to Survive a Shark Attack special, so I seized my opportunity during Discovery's press day to ask for his take on the beloved film that did not quite accurately portray great white shark behavior.
Shark Week couldn't have recruited a better leading man for How to Survive a Shark Attack than Paul de Gelder, as he quite literally has survived a shark attack. He lost a hand and a leg after being attacked by a bull shark, and he put his knowledge to use in this particular Discovery special. When I spoke with de Gelder for Shark Week 2025, which kicked off with Tom Bergeron's Dancing with Sharks (to mixed reactions from viewers), he weighed in on how Jaws has affected popular opinions about sharks:
I love Jaws. I think it's one of the best movies ever made. And my concern is not about Jaws the movie or any other shark movie. It's in people that can't tell reality from fiction. I think we should be more concerned about those folk. Jaws came out in 1975. There wasn't any internet, we didn't have phones, mobile phones and all that stuff. We just kind of relied on what the media could feed us in the local newspaper or the news. Now we have the wealth of the world's knowledge within a few keystrokes.
It sounds like Paul de Gelder would agree with CinemaBlend ranking the nightmare-inducing Jaws as one of the best horror movies of all time! He pointed out that the world was a very different place back in 1975, and director Steven Spielberg himself shared his regret that Jaws led to the mass killing of real-life sharks (which are much more functional than the movie's great white). Nowadays, as the attack survivor pointed out, it's very important to tell reality from fiction when it comes to these animals.
None of this is to say that Paul de Gelder believes that most Jaws fans don't discern reality from fiction, since there are more resources in 2025 than 1975... although he did admit that there's one way that sharks really aren't helping themselves when it comes to their reputations. He went on:
We're not as singleminded in our information sources, and so I think everyone is a little wiser. I think they know that Jaws wasn't real. And so we're trying to break down some of the myths that are spread by the newspapers now and the news articles talking about 'man-eating killer off the coast waiting to stalk your children' and all that. The sharks don't do us any favors either. They're a pretty bad PR client. You stand up for them, you talk about how they're essential and they're not super dangerous, and then they go and bite someone. Back to square one.
As an annual viewer of Shark Week who also loves Jaws to the point of once watching it while en route to an ocean beach vacation, I love Paul de Gelder's take on sharks as "a pretty bad PR client." While shark attacks on humans are quite rare, they make very big headlines when they do happen, and Jaws immortalized the idea of a rogue shark going on a killing spree.
But if de Gelder could go from being attacked by a bull shark to promoting shark protection and conservation year after year on Shark Week, surely we can all go the extra mile to remember that Jaws is fiction, shark attacks being rare is the reality, and we can definitely just enjoy "one of the best movies ever made."
If you missed Paul de Gelder's How to Survive a Shark Attack when it aired on Discovery, you can stream it now with a Max subscription as well as other Shark Week installments of 2025. This was only one of several specials featuring de Gelder this week, with others including 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 year on July 26.
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