Amy's Robot

The Return of Morgan Spurlock

One of the biggest reasons that Super Size Me was such a success was the movie's charming, self-deprecating, and ready-for-anything star and creator, Morgan Spurlock (see his blog here.) Tonight his new TV series "30 Days" premieres on FX--read a very positive NY Times review here. The premise of the show combines the cross-cultural transplantation of "Wife Swap" (aka "Help! There's a Bitch in My House!", a favorite show of ours) with Barbara Ehrenreich's first-person insights into class issues in her book Nickel and Dimed, and features people spending 30 days in an environment that challenges their basic assumptions about life in America.

The first episode follows Spurlock himself (and his beleaguered vegan girlfriend who we met in Super Size Me) as the couple tries to live on minimum wage jobs in Columbus, OH. Future episodes take the best elements of "Wife Swap", but make the subjects stay in their new environments for a whole month.

Subjects include a racist Christian guy going to live with a Muslim-American family, a homophobic Christian guy going to live and work in the Castro, a gas-guzzling guy from New Jersey going to live on a self-sustaining eco-village in Missouri, and my personal favorite, a mother concerned about her teenage daughter's heavy drinking who becomes a binge drinker herself for a month, while her horrified daughter watches.

Summer programming! It's the greatest! "30 Days" premieres tonight at 10.

categories: TV
posted by amy at 3:32 PM | #