Everybody. Please. Leave the friggin’ sharks alone

Yes, Sharknado and its unholy offspring were a kind of idiotic fun, like watching a clown car explode, but the spreading media virus that is “Shark Week” in all its grotesque variations is really getting out of hand.

Tuesday night, The Discovery Channel goes insane, with three brand new hour-long shows about the unspeakble horror that is shark: Monster Hammerhead Reload, Alien Sharks: Return to the Abyss, and Lair of the MegaShark. Great titles, we grant you, but come on. Leave the poor fish alone.

You know what animals we should be scared of? The ones that actually deserve a week of dire predictions and twisted celebrations? Friggin’ mosquitoes, that’s who. Those disease-riddled little bastards kill tens of thousands every year. Or snakes. Fifty thousand people a year die from snakebite, and we get, what, one lousy Snakes on a Plane movie every few years. Or scorpions – at least the ones in Africa or the Middle East – knock off about 5,000 humans each year. Crocodiles, elephants, hippos, cape buffaloes, even lions – yeah, lions, what few are still left in the wild – kill substantially more men, women, and children than the lowly shark. JELLYFISH, for God’s sake, JELLYFISH kill more than a hundred each year, especially the really mean ones off the coasts of Australia.

And you know how many deaths there are every year from sharks? Ten to twenty-five. That’s it. Ten. To Twenty-five.

So enough already. No more specials, no more “weeks,” no more ‘nados. The fact is, sharks, despite their superior numbers, barely beat out bears in man-killing, and bears would rather run away than fight any time. Which is good, since they’re strong enough to basically bite open your house if they want to.

So where are the Bearricane movies? Where is that Flood o’ Scorpions flick we’ve always dreamed of? We should be into the third sequel on Snake Quake by now, what …

Hmm. Snake Quake.

Alice, get SyFy on the blower. I think we have a winner!