Netflix, the great white shark of streaming, is wading into Discovery’s and Nat Geo’s waters.
This holiday weekend, National Geographic Channel’s 13th annual SharkFest debuts, beating Discovery Channel’s 37th Shark Week to the schedule. This summer, the blood in the water isn’t from chum, rather it’s from a whale of a new competitor: Netflix.
Netflix dominates pretty much all things TV, so why should shark content be any different? On June 30, Netflix premiered its documentary Shark Whisperer, which follows Ocean Ramsey in her unique (and controversial — and viral) approach to marine conservation: swimming freely with gigantic sharks for hours on end. Shark Whisperer, the latest underwater documentary film from James Reed, the Oscar-winning director of My Octopus Teacher, has treaded water among Netflix’s top 10 films each day since.
Shark Whisperer is not Netflix’s only shark programming of the summer — though it will be all of TV’s standout shark program of the summer — it’s not even Netflix’s only shark programming of the week.
On July 4, Netflix debuted new competition series All the Sharks. It’s not the sharks themselves competing — this isn’t Shark Week — All the Sharks features four teams of shark experts attempting to photograph the most shark types within an allotted number of days. The winners get $50,000 for their chosen marine charity.
By the time SharkFest premieres, America might be all sharked out. Two weeks ago marked the 50-year anniversary of Jaws (June 20, 1975) — for weeks now we’ve had a boatload of content about the most famous piece of shark programming ever. How much more can one take? Nat Geo is hoping that answer is “25 hours more.”
SharkFest kicks off with Sharks Up Close With Bertie Gregory on July 5 and concludes with Shark Quest: Hunt for the Apex Predator on July 13. But the featured program of SharkFest 2025 is… more Jaws.
To be fair, Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story is, well, the definitive inside story. It is authorized by Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment and features “rare archival footage and interviews with acclaimed Hollywood directors, top shark scientists and conservationists,” per Nat Geo. It also features Spielberg himself, the man who ruined great white sharks for everybody on the planet not named Ocean Ramsey.
Jaws, from left: Richard Dreyfuss, Robert Shaw, 1975.
Courtesy Everett Collection
July 10’s Jaws @ 50 “uncovers the behind-the-scenes chaos and how the film launched the summer blockbuster, inspired a new wave of filmmakers, and paved the way for shark conservation that continues today,” Nat Geo continued. (Ramsey might take issue with any idea that Jaws aided shark conservation.)
So, it’s that and about 23 hours of shows about real sharks.
As for Ramsey, well, she’s seen enough Jaws — and Jaws-inspired programming — to last a Greenland shark’s lifetime. (Google it.)
“It doesn’t really help that a lot of mainstream, traditional media has dramatized and sensationalized sharks because Jaws was, you know, a Hollywood-blockbuster kind of film,” Ramsey told THR of her motivation to make Shark Whisperer. “So I was just really grateful to work with a fresh platform like Netflix that has a global reach. They’re willing to actually showcase reality and show sharks on a deeper level and talk about not just research, but their behavior in the water.”
The global reach of Netflix is crucial here. While shark fin soup is primarily consumed in China, people in countries all over the world are harvesting (read: killing sharks and cutting off their fins) their waters to meet that demand.
SharkFest 2025 actually has more hours programmed than Shark Week 2025 (21 hours). Nat Geo says last year’s SharkFest racked up more than 69 million hours of viewing, inclusive of streaming on Disney+ and Hulu.
“SharkFest puts sharks where they belong — at the center of every story. We work hand-in-fin with leading experts to capture breakthrough research, rare behaviors and untold perspectives, pairing their insights with stunning visuals of the ocean’s beauty,” Janet Han Vissering, svp of development and production, told THR for this story. “The result is a great white shark-sized programming event guided by science, not sensationalism, dispelling old myths, exploring the truth behind the critical role they play in the health of our oceans. We shed a new light on these misunderstood predators while delivering fresh thrills year after year.”
(And I thought I made too many shark puns in this story.)
Shark Week remains culturally relevant, thanks to strong branding and a 24-year first-mover advantage. Warner Bros. Discovery says the last Shark Week reached 25 million total viewers across Discovery Channel, Discovery+ and Max. Among adults 25-54, Shark Week 2024 claimed seven of Nielsen’s Top 10 spots that week across ad-supported cable, excluding news and sports.
Underwater Janelle VanRuiten Feeding Shark on Dancing with Sharks during Shark Week 2025.
Terence Patrick/Courtesy of Discovery Channel
The key to Shark Week’s longevity and popularity is a lighter look at the biggest, toothiest fish. (Don’t fact-check me on that.) Think of SharkFest as like Marine Biology (which makes Shark Whisperer AP Marine Bio) and Shark Week like having a substitute teacher in gym class.
Shark Week is more prone to the sensationalism that Ramsey rails against (my observation, not hers). And Ramsey says it is “challenging for the public to differentiate” between good and bad shark programming. Some of the most popular stuff exploits “the rare adverse interactions” between man and shark. (This observation is hers, but like mine in the prior sentence, is objectively correct.) Ramsey says she has been asked to participate on some of these shows and has “walked away” when her concerns about message “fell on deaf ears.”
Ramsey did not single out a network or program by name; she didn’t want to.
“I want to work with everyone. I’m very collaborative,” she said. “I just want to try and help encourage people towards moving towards addressing conservation issues and being more realistic and sensitive to the tone.”
Like, you know, Shark Whisperer.
Let’s dive deeper (though not as deep as Ramsey, who can hold her breath for six and a half minutes) into the coming weeks’ basic-cable shark lineup.
Shark Week 2025 premieres with Dancing With Sharks (8 p.m. ET/PT), hosted by former Dancing With the Stars host Tom Bergeron. Dancing with Sharks has five divers competing to put together an amazing underwater routine — with sharks, of course.
“From hammerheads to tigers and nurse sharks, each shark has its own signature dance moves,” the Dancing With Sharks logline reads. “At the end of the show, a winner is crowned — if all the competitors make it that far.”
As the name lays out, an entire week of (more) shark programming follows, totaling 21 hours in all. Highlights include Great White Sex Battle (July 21 at 8 p.m. ET/PT), which is a bit less exciting (and weird) than it might first read.
“In a Shark Week first, male and female great white sharks compete in a series of challenges to determine which sex is the superior predator in the waters off the coast of New Zealand,” per the press release.
OK, so maybe it should have been titled Great White Battle of the Sexes and not, well, what it is named.
And then there is my personal favorite, Jaws vs Mega Croc (9 p.m. ET/PT).
“Using data gathered in new experiments, Tristan Guttridge, Rosie Moore and Dr. Sora Kim construct a CGI fight to the death between two of the biggest and baddest apex predators in the water — the Great White Shark and Nile Crocodile,” the logline says.
I say: Hell yes.
But what do the oddsmakers at BetOnline say? After THR provided the bookies with the above title and logline, they chose shark as the heavy favorite (-500) with the underdog undercroc a long shot at +350, with the noted caveat that water depth could move those odds significantly. We’d take Nile Crocodile all day at that line, but it’s not prop they’re actually willing to post.