THE BIRTH OF SHARK NATION

Gizmodo once called Shark Week "the brainchild of a stoned Discovery Channel employee that became a national holiday." But according to Runnette, none of the founding fathers of Shark Week were stoned at the moment of Shark Week's conception—though they may very well have been lightly inebriated.

"I wouldn't say stoned, but the idea was definitely scribbled down on the back of a cocktail napkin," Runnette says with a laugh. The legend, as she tells it, goes like this: In the early years of the Discovery Channel, executives John Hendricks, Clark Bunting, and Steve Cheskin, widely considered the three main primogenitors of the Discovery Channel, were seated at a bar among a group of their Discovery colleagues in what one can only imagine was probably euphemized as a "post-work brainstorming session."

The next events played out exactly as millions of shark fanatics across the globe have probably imagined. "As I've heard it, they were just talking about what kinds of things would be fun to do on Discovery," the executive producer says. "And one of them said something like, 'You know what would be awesome? Shark Week!' And somebody in that nexus scribbled it down on a napkin. You know how that is. An idea in a bar comes from many fathers." (An interview in Michigan State University's State News last week credits Bunting, an MSU alum, as the creator of Shark Week—and Bunting told the publication the idea surfaced "in a discussion about programming strategies.")

It had been a decade since Steven Spielberg's Jaws gave moviegoers the collective creeps about open-water swimming, and the fledgling network had noticed a spike in ratings whenever shark-related programming was aired on Discovery. So the three amigos got to work back at the studio, and in the late summer of 1988, Shark Week hit the airwaves.

The first Shark Week opened on July 17, 1988, with Caged in Fear, a science-history piece on the process of testing motorized shark cages. Ratings that week surged to twice what the network usually garnered in primetime. Bunting told the State News he wished he could say he'd had some inkling at the time that he'd created a pop-culture titan—but frankly, he said, he was "as surprised as anyone else" to see it take off so explosively.

Its success spawned a sequel in 1989, and its ascent from there, remarkably, never faltered. "Everybody was always fairly surprised that it kept working," Runnette says. "It kind of taught us what it wanted to be, in a way."

In the following years, Shark Week's producers learned on the fly. They've always been careful to send out experienced natural-history filmmaking teams to shoot shark footage—"not just cowboys," Runnette says. However, "We know more and more about shark behavior now, so nobody dresses like a seal when they go out to shoot video of a shark. You don't want to look like food," she says. "They also realized they could build a seal decoy [to attract the sharks] and get that 'Air Jaws' breaching shot in a way that actually allowed them to focus the camera and [compose] the shot."