Morgan Spurlock, of Super Size Me fame (the movie where he eats nothing but McDonalds for 30 days, and his health suffers), has a new TV series out that I recommend. It is called 30 Days and is a generalization of the Super Size Me idea. Spurlock puts a person or people (sometimes himself and his girlfriend) into an environment very different from their current life bubble. He then makes a one hour (with commercials) reality-tv documentary of that time.

I’ve seen a few episodes. In one, he and his girlfriend live on minimum wage for a month. In another, he sends a young conservative religious man to live with gay men in San Francisco. In another, he sends two New York area urbanites to an eco-community “off the grid” in Missouri.  IN another, he sends a young Christian man to live among Muslims in Dearborn, Michigan.

The episodes are not brilliant, but they are watchable. Spurlock picks his subjects pretty well, displays non-mainstream lifestyles sympathetically, educates relatively unobtrusively, and comes from a political point of view that I find compatible.

I have often thought about working a series of different jobs for short periods of time, just to experience other ways of living. This series provides a similar kind of window into our big country.

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