Image Credit: Discovery

Tonight, Discovery’s 24th annual Shark Week continues with Chief Shark Officer Andy Samberg hosting Shark City, which takes a Meerkat Manor approach to introducing viewers to the individual personalities found in a group of Caribbean reef sharks who enjoy communal living and have been named by the folks at Stuart’s Cove. (Sample: Big Momma). Samberg shot wraparounds for the hour at multiple locations with sharks. “The pitch was that I would get to fly to the Bahamas and literally swim with sharks, and I was thinking there’s no way I would ever have the balls to do that on my own, so I went for it,” Samberg says.

Producers started him off slow: ”He flies in from the set of something else, gets off a plane, we put him on a boat, and he’s taken to this little island in the middle of nowhere, put into a bathing suit, and sits down at a desk in the water with sharks swimming around his legs,” says executive producer Deirdre Gurney. She insists Samberg tipping his chair backwards and blindly falling into the sharks was his idea. “I had to just kind of ignore it,” he says of his fear. “I went into Braveheart mode.”  READ FULL STORY »

There was a warning at the start of Discovery’s Tuesday night Shark Week premiere Killer Sharks saying some viewers might find reenactments of the horrific attacks that terrorized the coastal town of Durban, South Africa over the holiday season of 1957 disturbing. Disturbing and awesome! “We went there,” executive producer Deirdre Gurney laughs to EW. Her company, Gurney Productions, has done a lot of reenactment shows for Discovery and Animal Planet, and multiple Shark Week productions (include tonight’s How Sharks Hunt with Cody and Dave of Dual Survivor and Thursday’s Shark City with Andy Samberg), so this was the culmination of all they’ve learned. What does filming arguably the most graphic reenactments seen in 24 years of Shark Week entail? Here are a few key ingredients:

• A lot of morning trips to the butcher shop. “We have a producer who’s amazing with the meat. They go to the butcher shop in the morning, and they know the cut that they like. It’s a sirloin. And they ask the butcher to cut it frozen so they can get super thin slices. They lay that over the part of the limb that we bury in the sand, and then juice it up with blood and a couple chunks of chicken, which makes, like, the chunky meat,” Gurney says. “We definitely should have shot behind-the-scenes for this one because the crew was just so passionate about it, and I think it’s definitely noticeable. And our wonderful actors who would lay there with meat on them, especially the little girl who was like 11 (pictured) — we chopped the poor little girl’s arm off.”  READ FULL STORY »

Discovery kicks off its 24th annual Shark Week on Sunday, July 31, with the all-new special Great White Invasion (9 p.m. ET). It’s a fascinating examination of why great white sharks are swimming closer to shore in Southern California, Australia, and South Africa, and who’s really at risk — us or them. (Spoiler: It’s them.) Jeff Kurr, a filmmaker who’s been a part of Shark Week since 1991, noticed the phenomenon while shooting last year’s Ultimate Air Jaws special with wildlife photographer Chris Fallows. In Great White Invasion, Fallows wants to show people that great whites won’t always just attack for no reason. It leads to two of the most mind-blowing minutes in Shark Week history. READ FULL STORY »