It's once again that time of year when I'm reminded of why I don't go into the ocean past my ankles: Shark Week.

Shark Week 2011 kicks off tonight on Discovery with Chief Shark Officer Andy Samberg ("Saturday Night Live") serving as host for the entire week.

Discovery is bringing back some old favorites for their 24th annual thrill-fest ("Top Five Eaten Alive," am I right?), but there are also seven brand new shark shows debuting this year.

Also, for the first time, Shark Week 2011 will feature live co-viewing for iPad, iPhone, and web users. Download the apps or be at the Shark Week website each night for three consecutive hours of interactive content designed to enhance your Shark Week TV viewing.

Things start tonight at 9 with one of Discovery's new programs. "Great White Invasion" is a chilling look at why great white sharks are suddenly being found swimming around surfers and vacationers from South Africa to Australia, and up and down the California coast. Why? WHY!? After that, another new show, "Jaws Comes Home," tells the story of shark expert Greg Skomal as he documents six months following five great whites with names like Curly and Ruthless. His mission is to understand more about their 1,200 mile journey up and down the eastern seaboard.

Check out the full Shark Week schedule at the official Shark Week website, where you can also view shark galleries and watch videos.

I love cats and I generally enjoy watching television shows about them. But after a brief peek, I don't think I'm cut out for National Geographic Wild's Big Cat Week, which begins tonight. It's that whole "circle of life" thing I have trouble watching. I understand it, I just don't want to see it.

But if you enjoy watching animals chase and eat other animals, this is for you.

NatGeoWild will showcase a special film about big cats each night this week at 9pm. Here's the schedule.

Today is the official end of Shark Week (take a moment...) and the Discovery Channel is repeating the best of the best of their shark programming all day.

The full schedule is on their site, but let's list some of our very favorites:

• Sharks: Are They Hunting Us? (yes) at 9am
• How Not to Become Shark Bait at 12 noon
• Day of the Shark at 2pm
• Shark Bite: Adventures in Shark Week (Craig Ferguson's shark dive) at 3pm

We also suggest renting "Jaws" and then driving down to Kure Beach for a swim.

Goodbye, Shark Week! See you next summer!

First of all, the deadliest shark is whichever one eats you. That one immediately moves to the top of the deadliest shark list.

But as far as the deadliest types of sharks, Discovery lays that out for you in their "10 Deadliest Sharks" program, which comes in a two-part special starting at 8pm.

Featured: bull sharks, hammerheads, great whites, grey reef sharks, oceanic white-tips, and makos.

Also tonight, "Mythbusters: Shark Special 2" takes a look at common shark myths like, will chili powder repel sharks? I'm guessing no. That's at 10pm.

Tonight on "River Monsters" (9pm) Jeremy fishes for bull sharks in South Africa's freshwater rivers.

Note to self: In addition to oceans, also stay out of  freshwater rivers.

Also on Discovery tonight, "Jaws of the Pacific" (8pm), which is pretty self-explanatory: it's about sharks found in the Pacific Ocean. There's also a repeat of "Into the Shark Bite" (10pm), which documents the power of a shark bite.

Our spotlight tonight is on "Shark Bites: Adventures in Shark Week," in which "Late, Late Show" host Craig Ferguson goes diving with sharks in the Bahamas.

You know, sharks don't care if you're famous. They will still eat you.

"Shark Bites," airing at 10pm on Discovery, also features first person accounts of shark attacks. 

Other shark shows tonight are "Air Jaws II: Even Higher" (8pm) and "Ultimate Air Jaws" (9pm).

Tonight's Shark Week Spotlight is "Shark Bite Beach" (9pm), a new Discovery program which examines the summer of 2008, when sharks munched all up and down the coasts of California and Mexico.

The show includes re-enactments of attacks, reports from survivors, and guesses about what may have prompted the attacks.

At 7pm, Discovery is repeating "Shark Bite Summer," which recounts the crazy number of shark attacks during the summer of 2001. The 8pm offering, "Top Five Eaten Alive," is from 2007 and features five shark attack survivors telling harrowing tales of "too-close" encounters.

If you listened to me and stayed out of the ocean, you wouldn't need to watch tonight's feature, Shark Attack Survival Guide (9pm, Discovery). 

You get tips for surviving shark attacks from former Green Beret Terry Schappert, who gets into the water with live sharks to recreate five scenarios based on survivors stories.

Also on tonight, Day of the Shark 3 (10pm) in which six shark attack survivors (including a Navy SEAL, a surfer, and a snorkeler) recount their experiences.

Tonight marks the beginning of Shark Week, when we all get to see sharks the way God intended: on our televisions.

Discovery starts things off at 9pm with a new show, Ultimate Air Jaws, full of scary great white sharks in South Africa that jump clear out of the water. One uplifting feature of this program is slowing down a shark's one-second assault to stretch out over an entire minute, for a really detailed look at the predator in action.

If you like that kind of thing, there's a repeat at 8pm of an oldie but a goodie, Air Jaws: The Sharks of South Africa. Same sort of stuff -- flying sharks leaping out of the water to snatch unsuspecting seals.

Then at 10pm, in Into the Shark Bite, the actual power of shark bite is documented (it's strong). 

Sharkbite Summer (8pm, Discovery) - Chronicling the shark attacks in the summer of 2001 (dubbed by the media as The Summer of the Shark), including the infamous severing of an 8-year-old boy's right arm in Florida.

Monk (9pm, USA) - The premiere of Monk's 8th and final season has our favorite detective guarding a former child star (Elizabeth Perkins) who turns out to be pretty different from the character she once played on TV. Monk tries to see past her many peccadillos to find the person who is trying to kill her.

Psych (10pm, USA) - Friday nights are complete once again, with the return of "Monk" and "Psych" to USA. Tonight marks season four for "Psych." Gus and Shawn (Dulé Hill and James Roday) meet an elusive art thief (Cary Elwes) in Vancouver, and discover he's not everything he seems.

20/20 (10pm, ABC) - A profile of a Philadelphia man who was born with his heart growing outside his body. After undergoing numerous surgeries, 33-year-old Christopher Wall now leads a normal life.