Not to spoil Shark Week for everyone, but I worked on a Shark Week show, and...

spoilers for all shark week shows

...everything was completely fabricated. The producers of the show wanted there to be constant danger and drama (which is par for the course for ANY reality programming), so we were constantly editing and re-editing segments to make it seem like the talent was in mortal peril; which, of course, never happened.

The raw footage even had a moment where the show runner repeatedly goaded the boat captain to make “fake” distress calls over the radio to use in certain segments. The boat captain was clearly hesitant and more than pissed about it, but obliged anyway because, hey, when there’s cameras around, people will do just about anything.

Typically, with the reality shows I work on, we take what actually happened and artificially ramp up the drama to 11, but this was the one time I felt like we were just flat out lying to the audience.