NETWORK: FX
AIR DATE: June 3, 2008
STARRING: Morgan Spurlock
CREATED BY: Morgan Spurlock

One of the best summer series over the last few years has been FX's 30 Days, the brainchild of Morgan Spurlock, the director behind Super Size Me and Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden. In many ways, what he has accomplished with this excellent series is more impressive than the feature films he's released around the country. "Reality TV" often gets justly derided but it really shouldn't be pigeonholed as "all the same thing." This is a genre that can support everything from The Hills to Black/White. On the latter end of the spectrum is 30 Days, a sometimes-brilliant show about how one person's reality can be very different from another's. The general concept of the show is a mini-version of Super Size Me, in which Spurlock ate nothing but McDonald's for thirty days. But the series often places the focus on two very different people exposing each other to their world views. It's usually a dual experience. In the first two seasons, we saw a Muslim live with a Christian family, Spurlock try to live on minimum wage, and a pro-choice and pro-life proponent try and live together for around a month. The FX series is back for six more experiments. Naturally, they have a varying degree of success, but, as a whole, you should watch the entire series. It's just six hours of your life. Can't you give six hours for 30 Days?

The first half of the third season of 30 Days are, if memory serves me, the best three-episode arc in the history of the series. They're certainly among the best episodes produced to date. The season premiere finds Morgan heading down to West Virginia, his home state, and spending thirty days working in a coal mine. Spurlock puts his life at risk to show you something truly remarkable, at least for those of us who take things like coal mining for granted. These people head miles underground and put both their short and long-term safeties at risk. It's an interesting episode - the ones where Spurlock is the participant are usually the season's best - but it's actually topped by the next two episodes, proving that the show has life even when Spurlock is merely the narrator. The second episode of season three is "30 Days in a Wheelchair" and the star is the Superbowl-winning former Denver Broncos player Ray Crockett. It's a fascinating hour, especially when you consider that Crockett and everyone he's ever played football with had to consider life as a paraplegic every time they took the field. Finally, the third episode features one of the more fascinating protagonists in recent TV memory, a life-long hunter who is forced to live with a group of PETA vegans, one of whom who is so over-the-top that she thinks killing chickens for food is as much a crime as what the Nazis did to the Jews in the Holocaust.

The first three episodes of season three of 30 Days really exemplify this series at its best. Each has a very different focus - coal mining, the physically handicapped, and animal rights - but they're clearly of the same show vision. All three are must-sees. There are moments in the second half of the season that echo the show's strength but they're all a slight step down. The problem with a show like 30 Days is that sometimes you're bound to get a protagonist who doesn't quite play along. The "star" of the fourth episode, as close-minded a woman as you're ever going to see on television, just frustrated me too much to enjoy the hour. The great thing about the "Animal Rights" episode is that everyone is open-minded enough to move a little closer to the center on the spectrum but the heroine who believes that same sex parenting is bordering on evil is too stubborn to move. In a similar vein, the fifth episode, "Gun Control", features a subject that hits too close to home for me to see the other side. Finally, Spurlock himself returns to live on an Indian reservation for thirty days. It's a good episode, but it feels like it's merely scratching the surface of a very serious subject and might have been better served as a feature film.

The "flaw" of the final episode of season three should be reason alone to watch 30 Days. How many reality shows could you say are weaker because they have so many ideas in them that they could be feature-length documentaries? You can count them on one hand. In many ways, that's what Spurlock and FX have accomplished, a six-part series of mini-movies. Don't miss it.