Malinowski stars in new Netflix series

By David Nordby

The Brillion News

This story first appeared in the July 24, 2025, print edition of The Brillion News.

Brillion native Chris Malinowski during filming for the Netflix series "All the Sharks." The show is available to stream on Netflix. (Photo courtesy of Netflix)

Teams of two compete to photograph sharks, including the rarest species, all over the world in Netflix’s new reality show “All the Sharks.”

The show is geared toward kids, according to the streaming service. Not so long ago, one of the competitors on the show started out as a curious kid of his own.

“My interest brewed from small town Brillion where I was bumming around keeping that curiosity as a kid. Eventually it became that curiosity as a scientist,” Chris Malinowski said.

Malinowski, 41, attended St. Mary's Catholic School (now Holy Family Catholic School) through eighth grade in Brillion. His parents, Bob and Debi, still live in nearby Sherwood.

“We’re very much so connected to the Brillion community, and I still have a lot of friends that I stay in touch with,” he told The Brillion News in an interview this week.

The six-episode series that premiered on July 4 has drawn plenty of interest from those in the area.

In the series, Malinowski teams with Brendan Talwar, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The two compete for shark-shaped trophies and a $50,000 charity award for nonprofits.

Malinowski, who’s already lived a full life as a marine biologist, is the current director of research and conservation in Key Largo, Fla., for the Colorado-based Ocean First Institute.

Life as a Marine Biologist

You don’t have to grow up near an ocean to dedicate your life to it. Malinowski is proof of that.

“My experience growing up was awesome,” Malinowski said. “A different time, I guess, but growing up in a small town, I had pretty good freedom to just explore around.”

He recalls always being curious in general, looking for frogs, snakes and even digging for golf balls in the pond to use at Deer Run Golf Course.

“It was just a cool way to grow up in a small town ... Just being able to explore. I spent a lot of my time exploring outside,” Malinowski said.

And while there might not be an ocean near Brillion, there are smaller bodies of water that first piqued Malinowski’s interest.

“I spent a lot of my free time with my friends going and fishing in local ponds and lakes,” Malinowski said.

Annual camping trips and learning about the Great Lakes added to his passion at a young age. Visiting extended family in Fort Meyers, Fla., brought his curiosity to another level, and offered some perspective into just how massive oceans are.

“That’s absolutely where my passion began. Of course, I had no idea what it was to be a marine biologist,” Malinowski said.

Malinowski says there’s no linear path to the career he’s had since graduating from Roncalli High School in 2002. He earned an undergraduate degree from the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, a master’s from Florida Atlantic University and his PhD from Florida State University.

He’s been around the oceans in his current role with Ocean First Institute for the lab he runs. He’s also worked near the Great Lakes in our Midwest region for Purdue University as a postdoctoral scholar, and earlier as an employee and intern at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee's School of Fresh Water Sciences.

The experience has been vast. Malinowski has worked with and been mentored by many scientists, which started with internships during his undergrad.

He’s known scientists who grew up in landlocked states and those who grew up near the oceans, but they all have one thing in common.

“Somehow, we find our way to the ocean, and maybe it’s just that curiosity, right, of just not knowing and having this dream that eventually brings you there. I don’t know how that actually developed necessarily. It was just an extension of what I was already interested in,” Malinowski said.

Malinowski says he’s a conservation biologist at heart, as well as professionally.

“So, everything that I do and explain to people and why storytelling is so important to me, I’m trying to tell the story of human impacts on the ocean and the positive side and the negative side of that. I want to connect people to the ocean regardless of where they live,” Malinowski said.

All humans, he says, are connected to the ocean.

“The ocean provides so much for us and our entire global ecosystem – food, oxygen, economic goods across the board, beauty, storytelling, culture,” Malinowski says.

It’s his job to study the health of the marine ecosystem and bring that information to the scientific community, as well as the general public.

“What I do is different than what some of my colleagues do. I think in general we’re trying to answer ... scientific questions that just aren’t answered yet. Standing on the shoulders of giants and really trying to build on our scientific knowledge is a general quest that all scientists are after,” Malinowski said.

Signing On for "All the Sharks"

It was around August 2023 when Malinowski received an email about a potential spot on a Netflix reality show. He was in no rush to respond to what he thought could be a spam message.

And if the email was legitimate there was still some caution involved for the marine biologist who has dedicated years to studying the health of the marine ecosystem.

Sharks have been over-sensationalized like with what the Discovery Channel leans into each year with Shark Week.

“It took a bit of convincing for us (Brendan and I) to even want to be part of this,” Malinowski said.

But after speaking with the show producers, he was more convinced it would be a good thing, especially since the executive producer is a scientist himself.

“That was really what sold us on it and sold me on it was that we were going to go around the world and showcase the incredible diversity of sharks and rays and allow for a bit of what they’ve termed ‘edu-tainment,’” Malinowski said, referring to the term combining elements of education and entertainment.

By the time the producers found Malinowski, it was already under Netflix’s umbrella. The show had been planned for about five years.

Malinowski was asked to select a partner for the show’s competition, which he did with Talwar, and after an interview between the two of them and producers, communication stopped.

About six months passed and Malinowski had given up on the idea. Then the producers reached back out and it was off to the races.

"All the Sharks" and Other Encounters

Editor's note: This section includes spoilers for the show, so if you haven't seen the series and don't want any information, avert your eyes.

Malinowski and Talwar were the only two people out of the eight competitors with PhDs, thus their team name “Shark Docs” was born. Other competitors came from other scientific disciplines like videography and journalism.

As viewers have now had almost three weeks to watch the series and see, the team's experience was vital. The two won the show competition to earn the $50,000 prize for the Ocean First Institute and another nonprofit, Reef Environmental Education Foundation (REEF).

Filming for the show started in summer 2024 and was nonstop going around the world to the sites that viewers of the show are pulled into from everywhere from the Bahamas to South Africa to Japan.

He had been a part of documentaries before, including for National Geographic, but this was a new experience.

“It was a reality show concept where you just had cameras on you all day. All day, and you just have to sort of adapt and figure out what your presence is,” Malinowski said.

He and Talwar talked in advance about being themselves on camera and remaining their natural selves.

“We’re not actors; we’re scientists, and that’s just what we need to show,” Malinowski said. “I think we were able to do that pretty well.”

After feeling anxious in the beginning, he says he got more comfortable in front of the

cameras as time went on.

“You don’t really understand how a reality show is filmed until you’re a part of it. One of the most incredible things, I think, is just how many people are involved,” Malinowski said.

There were almost 50 people at the start of the competition show’s filming in the Maldives between the competitors, the producers, production assistants, Netflix executives, a medical team and additional staff who prepped the site for filming.

“We’re just standing there like, ‘Oh my god, this is all for us. This is insane. It’s surreal.’ And I don’t think that ever left me as something that was going on,” Malinowski said.

The production was huge. The cameras and equipment traveled to the dream dive destinations, as Malinowski refers to them, that most will only see in their lifetime on a series like this one.

Instead of a professional like Malinowski visiting the locations throughout his lifetime, he saw all of them for 10 days at a time over the course of two months as filming took place with no breaks.

Some locations took multiple days to get to between the plane rides followed by buses or ferries.

“As a diver, that is just an insane change of everything,” Malinowski said. “I don’t even know how to describe it, honestly. It was just an incredible thing to be able to see all of these relatively healthy ecosystems like that.”

It was written into Malinowski’s contract that he could not be told what to say.

“My reputation as a scientist is bigger than a show, but they were good about it. They were really good about it,” Malinowski said.

Now that he’s had some time to watch the series back, Malinowski thinks the show’s editing mostly captured the story.

“It’s always weird to watch yourself on TV. I think the producers did the best they could,” Malinowski said. “I think overall the show did a decent job of showcasing everyone’s personalities as they came out.”

Obviously not everything filmed could make it into the six episodes.

“I have to accept what they did and didn’t put in there but just the level of encounters that we had with wildlife in that short period of time was insane,” Malinowski said.

One of those encounters was with humpback whales off Heron Island on the Great Barrier Reef.

“Swimming alongside two humpback whales on a beautiful coral reef that they filmed was just an insane moment for both of us that we were hoping they were going to showcase,” Malinowski said.

The two won the competition, Malinowski said, by “just never getting out of the water.”

“We were busting our butts constantly. We used every single minute that we had during the competition diving or snorkeling, and when we were snorkeling in the shores in the Galapagos, we were in about six feet of water hanging out with some sea lions and watching them, and then out of nowhere in that shallow rocky area, comes this massive tiger shark and just swims past me,” Malinowski said, adding he lost his breath for a moment at the unexpected encounter.

“I don’t think they completely showed how intense that moment was because that was kind of freaky seeing this tiger shark. It was different than in the Maldives where they’re kind of controlled and around a feeding area. This was the most wild encounter I’ve ever had with a tiger shark,” he said.

Then there was about a half hour in the water where they were within a foot of orcas who were diving into the abyss of the water then returning near Malinowski and Talwar.

“That was one of my top five moments in my entire life just spending time in the wildest part of the world that I think I’ve ever been to with the apex predators in the ocean,” Malinowski said. “Most sharks are not apex predators ... and when you’re in the water with something like an orca, you know you’re in the presence of a massively powerful animal.”

Malinowski says that a lot of time in the water helps in those moments to remain calm and not be overly reactive.

“I think internally what going on is just extreme excitement mixed with probably a little bit of pure adrenaline, for sure, that we’re kind of suppressing until after the moment.”

Looking Ahead

Malinowski said that now that a year has gone by since filming and the series premiered, he finally had the chance to process what they've been through.

There was exhaustion after the worldwide film session.

"I'm able to sit down and reflect of what actually happened while we were on these dives a little more seeing it on screen," Malinowski said.

Malinowski will continue on his current path leading research and education programs, and although he isn't sure exactly what direction his research will take him in years ahead, he says one thing's for sure - our ecosystems need sharks.

“We’re still learning what these ecosystems are and how they function, and sharks are top predators that really kind of have a position in, say, the food web where if they get taken out of the system, then everything below them can have a cascading effect,” Malinowski said. “There’s a fragility to ecosystems in balance, and humans have a major impact on that.”

Malinowski’s job is to help explain that to people, which goes back to why he agreed to be a part of “All the Sharks.”

“I think it’s just fear and fascination kind of combined. A lot of people don’t know about sharks,” he said, adding his own fascination has grown after researching them for two decades. “It’s not just people in the United States watching television. There’s entire cultures of people that have historically been fascinated with sharks, and I think part of it’s the unknown. It’s also just seeing these things as the incredible predators that they are and that they’ve been around for so long ... Sharks, we think, have evolved for about the last 420 million years. These are animals that are extremely old, and we still don’t know a lot about them, especially in the deep sea.”

Malinowski now spends time working with middle and high school students, something he hopes to continue in the future. Once upon a time, he was one of those curious students starting to learn about marine biology.

“I think young me, he would have been like, ‘Yes, man. You did it. You went and did exactly what you wanted to and (followed your dream).’”

Editor's notes: The Shark Docs are leveraging their platform to share additional stories about sharks and rays from the locations they've visited, highlighting important research and conservation work by local scientists and conservationists. Beyond the show, Malinowski says, they're committed to telling compelling stories that educate and inspire.

Viewers can follow their ongoing work on Instagram @Shark_Docs and YouTube @SharkDocs.

The team has also launched "Beyond All The Sharks," a podcast series available on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. Links to all their content can be found through their Instagram Linktree.