INTERVIEW: Jeremy Wade explores ‘Dark Waters’
Photo: Jeremy Wade’s Dark Waters explores the unexplained mysteries of the world’s lakes and rivers. Photo courtesy of Animal Planet / Provided with permission.
For Jeremy Wade, host of the legendary reality series River Monsters, what lurks just beneath the surface is equal parts exhilarating and frightening. The TV host, and perhaps the most famous fisherman alive, has been heading out on the waters of the world to find evidence of peculiar species and confirm that sometimes old fisherman tales can prove true.
His latest project is called Jeremy Wade’s Dark Waters, which premieres Sunday, April 21 at 9 p.m. on Animal Planet. This time around Wade and his team investigate stories of unexplained phenomena in lakes and rivers on different continents.
On one episode there’s a possible lake monster in Italy’s Lake Garda, and then there’s the disappearance of the king salmon from Alaskan waters. One episode explores whether an Australian fish, long thought to be extinct, is actually still swimming around.
In many ways, Dark Waters is a continuation of the River Monsters brand.
“It all started as one episode, what was that 11 years ago now, and somehow we keep finding new stories, slightly different stories this time around,” Wade said in a recent phone interview. “I didn’t think I’d be doing it this long.”
For Dark Waters, his team has broadened their scope, but at the heart of each episode is still an underwater detective story.
“The classic River Monsters always started with a crime scene,” he said. “Somebody gets pulled under, or their foot gets bitten, something like that. There’s quite a lot of those, but it gets to the point where you run out of that kind of story. But I’ve got this mental file of other interesting creatures around the world, which don’t really quite fit that story, but you approach them in another way. We’ve got, for example, one episode on a mythical lake monster, another one on stories of freshwater mermaids in South Africa. We’ve got a fish species that a lot of people thought was extinct maybe coming back in Australia, and many things like I heard about a giant crayfish living in Tasmania. People say it’s the size of a dog, and it will break your fingers. Let’s try to find that. Is it really true? If it’s true, I want to see one.”
As Wade wades into each mystery, he starts with a healthy dose of skepticism. He fully understands the power of exaggeration (and sometimes fabrication) when it comes to catching these creatures with a pole and line.
“It’s a bit like River Monsters, we actually want something at the end that we can show people, so we filter out the stories where actually we’re not going to find anything,” Wade said. “So there will be something at the end of the program, but obviously for the purposes of the program, we start from the position of skepticism. It’s like here’s the story, and obviously like a lot of fisherman’s tales, some might be completely made up. Some might be exaggerated or embellished, although others maybe there’s something there.”
Wade’s team has a ton of experience traveling the world and trying find fish species in remote locations. A lot of the crew members on Dark Waters shared similar experiences with the host on River Monsters.
For the camera crew, the difficult part of the job is less finding the creature and more finding out how to set up the shot once Wade has hooked the beast.
“The really tricky moment is when you finally got the animal in your sights, and it’s all about showing something to the camera,” he said. “One thing that’s important is that I don’t injure myself in the process, but equally important, which everybody knows by now, is the fish or whatever else it is, that has to be disturbed as little as possible. We’ll take it out of the water. We’ll show it, and then we’ll put it back. And in order to do that, filming is obviously normally quite a start-stop process. You do it. You say the line again, and you do it at a different camera angle, all that kind of stuff. This is one part of the program where that can’t really happen. You’ve got to get it right the first time, so sometimes it might look a little bit scrappy. But that adds a bit to the atmosphere, so I think that’s the very challenging thing.”
Timing can be an issue as well. Once the team lands in the country, there’s a lot of filming to set up the framework (what Wade called the “scaffolding”) of the program. But each minute they spend recording local eyewitnesses and B-roll of the surrounding environs is a minute lost on the lake or river.
“You end up with limited time to find whatever it is you’re looking for,” Wade said. “Up to a point, that’s quite good. It concentrates the mind. It makes you effective. You can’t just search in an aimless way. You’ve got to do it in a very focused way.”
When Wade sets out on an adventure, there is a myriad of emotions running through his mind. Excitement and pressure take up equal space.
“If we don’t get that fish in here, we haven’t got a program,” he admitted. “We can be out there working long hours, very hard, and the worst-case scenario is that all of that comes to nothing. We’ve got the buildup, but we’ve got nothing at the end of it.”
Still, the positives outweigh the negatives.
“I think it’s quite addictive,” he said. “I think we all thrive on a bit of a challenge, and the secret is really it’s all about a realistic goal. It’s something over the years we’ve just developed a bit of a feel for. Over nine seasons of River Monsters, only on a couple of occasions we didn’t get what we were looking for. Normally we’ll get what we’re looking for, or we’ll get something else, which is as interesting or maybe more interesting. Or something else will happen, an unexpected ending. It’s about the research process, and it’s about assessing. Is this something that really is possible? Some things are more borderline than others. Some things are harder to pull off than others.”
Wade freely admitted that River Monsters, a top show for the network, continues to cast a long shadow. His TV appearances since have done well, but the numbers are not the same. That’s OK because he’s still searching, still adventuring, still exploring for what’s beyond the next bend in the river.
“The trouble with River Monsters, it’s such a hard act to follow,” he said. “It just ticks so many boxes, and we just got such an amazing diverse audience. How on earth do you follow that? You run the risk of whatever you do, maybe the numbers are less, so maybe people are disappointed. We did that one season of Mighty Rivers. That was a one-off, and obviously that was going a bit more into conservation. I think with that, great credit to Animal Planet for putting that on, for airing that on such a public network. We were expecting a dip in the numbers, which happened, but it was still a very respectable audience for primetime TV.”
This time, Wade doesn’t think he will run out of stories in the near future. There are definitely more adventures to be had.
“Even doing River Monsters, we would think, where are the stories going to come from,” he said. “We’d have to really fish for, dig for those stories, and once we did the first few seasons and you covered maybe some of the more obvious stories, the more obvious fish, it forces you to think laterally, to use a real journalistic sense of looking for the stories.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Jeremy Wade’s Dark Waters premieres Sunday, April 21 at 9 p.m. on Animal Planet. Click here for more information.
