Tom Bergeron's hosting a new dance competition ... though the new contestants are a whole lot more dangerous than your average group of celebrities -- these are some of the ocean's most dangerous predators.
00:00Explain what it is. I mean, I love the title, and the title's, you know, three-quarters of the battle.
00:08Absolutely.
00:09What is it?
00:10Well, it is, it's certainly what it says it is. It is a dancing competition underwater off the coast of Bimini in the Bahamas.
00:19Five professional shark handlers, one incredible underwater dancer and choreographer teaching them dance steps that they can do,
00:28you know, with your rhythmic hammerhead tiger shark, lemon shark.
00:34Doesn't that incite them if they're moving the way, I mean, with the guitar and it looks ominous?
00:41I mean, I literally got goosebumps watching that.
00:44Yeah, the issue is a lot of the sharks want to lead, and, you know.
00:51Do not step on his fin.
00:53That's an issue.
00:55But, you know, these are people, all five of these contestants, this is what they do for a living.
01:01Not dancing with sharks, but they're in the water with sharks all the time.
01:05They're doing scientific research.
01:07They're taking tour groups out and doing, you know, the cage dives and things of that nature.
01:13So being around sharks for all of them is almost second nature.
01:17It was adding the dance element that threw a new wrinkle into it.
01:21Somebody asked me, how did they get the sharks to dance?
01:24Well, you know, you obviously lure them over with food, but then we did that with some of the human contestants on Dancing with the Stars.
01:32A little raw steak.
01:35Craft services for Dancing with the Sharks.
01:37Exactly right.
01:38A little bit different, I think.
01:39But there's kind of this overarching theme.
01:42I love Shark Week.
01:43So there's this overarching theme of, you know, that people think sharks are our enemy and that sharks are these predators who are out to kill.
01:53And I think the point of all of this is to kind of blow up the myth.
01:57Yeah, and that's one of the things I think over the years, and this is the 37th year for Shark Week.
02:03But one of the things they've been really effective in doing is to take a little bit of that horror movie, that Spielbergian overblown fear of sharks away.
02:14Kinga Phillips, who's one of our judges on this show, and she's a familiar face to any Shark Week followers.
02:20She points out, look, you have to be respectful of sharks.
02:24They're not teddy bears, but by the same token, she gets up to close with sharks all the time.
02:33She said, I wouldn't get that close to a grizzly bear.
02:36So, you know, you have to be respectful that they are apex predators, but we're not their main interest, frankly.
02:44Do you get in the water?
02:45I will say this.
02:46For this particular contract, there was a coward clause.
