Sunday, 22 July 2018

Shark Week begins - July 22


Obligatory disclaimer: I hate my life. A new caveat: I hate my family even more; I did not expect to hate anything more than my life, yet surprisingly, I do. We, in our family, do not get along with each other, and with everyone/anyone else,…this is something else, and it is personal, so I am not going to dwell very much on it… this time. In addition, speaking of lives… ‘Shark Week’ of the Discovery channel is beginning today…on the Discovery channel…and it is bringing celebrities – human celebrities, and this brings us back to life: do any of those people have it?

No, seriously, this year’s ‘Shark Week’ of Discovery is bringing us Bear Grylls, and Shaq, and Ronda Rousey – all people who are supposed to be really famous and monumental in the lives of the peons, and they are all appearing on Discovery channel, and- wait. Isn’t Discovery channel supposed to educate, rather than entertain…as opposed to TMZ or whatever?

Rewind? Last year, a famous athlete of a swimmer – whether Michael Phelps or someone else, I neither remember nor care, admittedly – appeared on ‘Shark Week’, where he raced…CGI’d sharks. Basically, this was a free promo for the bloke, but since I do not remember him appearing ever in anything in the last year, (we are talking about summer of 2017 here), I guess that it did not work out for him. Why do Bear Grylls, and Shaq, and Ronda Rousey think that it will work for them?
Well, when it comes Ronda Rousey we might be off to something here. Ever since her defeat in MMA (or whatever it is called), her life was never the same, in a sad way. These days she might be on WWF, but it is not the same, and as for her TV debut…

No, seriously, Ronda Rousey was on ‘Blindspot’, (yes, the same TV series that we are discussing on occasion here), at the end of S2…for about one or two episodes, and that was it. Considering that ‘Blindspot’ had worked her up in its promo videos, this was weird…in an AoS way. Unlike the other Marvel TV series, (even ‘InHumans’), AoS had to deal with actors that went more than came, and as a result the main actors and their characters got reshuffled to different roles very often, especially in the later seasons. Ronda Rousey’s aborted presence on ‘Blindspot’ brought the same feeling to ‘Blindspot’, especially S3, which might be one of the reasons why it was somewhat different from the previous seasons, and not exactly in a good way. Something went wrong for Ronda Rousey with ‘Blindspot’, so now she is trying her luck on ‘Shark Week’, alongside Shaq and Bear. Here’re kudos for them; Ronda, in particular, will be dealing with mako sharks, which is good, for they hunt fish rather than marine mammals, but also bull sharks, which is work – these sharks are generalists and are game for anything, at least once, so if Ronda isn’t careful or dealing with CGI, she will be risking her life for real – and is it worth the (potential) fame?

The flip side, of course, is that unlike TMZ, WWF and the like, the Discovery channel was supposed to educate, rather than entertain, so why there are celebrities? What next, the World Wrestling Federation doing a number of shows with real life sharks also? The line between education and entertainment is blurring on the Discovery channel, and that isn’t good: for a while, Impossible Pictures, also did educational shows, but then they got into entertainment, and it was the beginning of their end, until BBC pulled the, out of their misery for good. Will the Discovery channel go down the same route? We will just have to wait and see.

This is it for this time; see you all soon!

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