Animal Planet Has Jumped The Shark

I missed it, but last month Animal Planet aired Mermaids: The Body Found.  Here's some of their promotional material:

Once upon a time, there lived a little mermaid in an underwater kingdom. She ventured to surface, longing to communicate with people on land…

This is a fairytale told and retold to children everywhere; it’s a beloved story about a legendary creature that’s described in the mythologies of nearly every human culture in history. People across all continents who’ve had no communications with other societies have described the same half-man, half-fish anomaly – they’ve spoken about the same mythic animal.

What if there’s a kernel of truth that lives beneath the legend of the mythic mermaid? Now, in MERMAIDS: THE BODY FOUND…Animal Planet brings viewers into the world where the legend is real. The film blends real-life events and phenomena with the story of two scientists who testify they found the remains of a never-before-identified sea creature. Spectacular CGI animates a world where mermaids really do swim below the water’s surface, cooperatively hunt with dolphins and may continue to survive in an intricate society where they stay hidden in fear of their Earth-bound relatives [….]

MERMAIDS: THE BODY FOUND is a story about evolutionary possibility grounded in a radical scientific theory – the Aquatic Ape Theory, which claims that humans had an aquatic stage in our evolutionary past. While coastal flooding millions of years ago turned some of our ancestors inland, is it possible that one group of our ancestors didn’t retreat from water but rather went in deeper? Could they have ventured farther into sea out of necessity and to find food? The Aquatic Ape Theory makes it possible to believe that while we evolved into terrestrial humans, our aquatic relatives turned into something strangely similar to the fabled mermaid [....].

MERMAIDS: THE BODY FOUND makes a strong case for the existence of the mermaid, a creature with a surprisingly human evolutionary history, whose ancestral branch splits off from a shared human root. The film is science fiction, using science as a springboard into imagination and centering the story on [two] real-world events.

It's not until the end that they mention this is science fiction, not an actual documentary. And who reads that far? (They do have an Editor's Note up top, though I'm not sure if that was added after there were complaints.) Apparently, the show as well didn't mention it was a fake until the end credits.

The Aquatic Ape Theory has been generally discredited--not that it would lead to mermaids anyway--but I guess it was enough of a "springboard" to create fake characters and incidents and government conspiraces to tell a story on television.

The channel is called Animal Planet. Is it too much to ask them to stick to actual animals on our planet? We've got quite a few.

Turns out Mermaids got great ratings.  Makes me wonder how many who watched thought it was real?  What it doesn't make me wonder is whether they'll do more shows like this.