Nine has launched Shark!, a new celebrity series that sends six local names into open water with sharks in the Bahamas, and Scott Cam is right in the middle of it. The show is built as a journey of escalating challenges, not a competition, and there are no prizes waiting at the end.
That matters because the series is arriving as a high-profile prime-time experiment: part wildlife education, part fear test, part free-to-air spectacle. Cam is joined by Tammy Hembrow, Sam Thaiday, Matt Nable, Ariarne Titmus and Lynne McGranger, with the format aiming to teach water safety, shark behaviour and why sharks matter to local ecosystems.
The cast is a mix of nerves and bravado. Hembrow and Thaiday are said to be excited for the adventure, while Thaiday, who is of Torres Strait Islander descent, has pointed out that his family totem is a hammerhead. Cam and Nable are more guarded. Cam said he was sure Channel Nine did not want him to die, while Nable knows people who have been attacked on Sydney’s northern beaches.
McGranger, 72, has emerged as something of the glue of the group, but even she was candid before her first dive, giving what she called too much information about her nervous belly. Titmus, meanwhile, is described as petrified and trying to conquer a genuine phobia. The show is trying to sell itself as educational, yet it is also built around celebrity tears and real physical peril in open water, which is exactly why it is hard to look away.
The format is adapted from a British version that featured Ross Noble last year, and the shark messaging comes wrapped in a wider warning about the oceans around Australia. Paul de Gelder, who lost his right hand and leg to a bull shark in 2009, says 30 per cent of all sharks are threatened with extinction and argues that controversial measures such as nets only put sharks in greater danger. He has spent the past decade making dozens of shark-related programs for Discovery Channel and re-created his attack for the HBO Max special How to Survive a Shark Attack last year.
De Gelder is joined by UK conservationist Annie Guttridge, and the series also sits against a grim backdrop of shark attacks in Australia, including two fatal spear-fishing incidents, one near Rottnest Island and another this week. That is the uneasy balance at the heart of Shark!: a show that wants viewers to learn about sharks while reminding them, episode by episode, that the danger is not imaginary. The one thing Nine has not explained is how far that danger will be allowed to go before the lesson stops and the stunt begins.
