30 Days

Through the miracle of video recorders, I watched -- only a day late -- the premiere episode of Morgan Spurlock's new series on fX, 30 Days. As part of the seemingly endless effort to slice the Super Size Me bologna as many ways as possible, this series puts people in an unfamiliar situation for 30 days and explores the larger sociopolitical context behind them.

I admit to having a soft spot for Spurlock, having met him at Full Frame Fest last year, and finding him to be perhaps one of the most unpretentious directors ever to appear at a film festival. He's someone who's just as pleasant to the old guy with the walker and the middle-aged self-styled film critic with the homemade business card as to the guy from the Loews theatre chain. But his now nearly-patented Walter Mitty in reverse concept has some serious chops below the affable surface.

In this first episode (the only one in which Spurlock himself is the guinea pig), he and his fiancee, Alex Jamieson, fresh off their Oscar Night o'Glamour, head to Columbus, Ohio to live as minimum wage workers for a month. This kind of "see how the other half lives" gimmick can seem pretty condescending -- honest stories of working people as told by rich Hollywood stars. And perhaps if Spurlock does succeed in his current path of being the less strident version of Michael Moore, he may end up seeming equally condescending.

But this very riches-to-rags trajectory portrayed in this first episode really shows that it really is only money separating the well-off from the minimum wage workers shown here. From the increasingly scruffy look of our protagonists as they spend a month in an ant-infested, cold apartment in a rough section of town, to the illnesses and injuries to which those who live day to day are subject to, with only free clinics and hospital emergency rooms for health care, by the end of the program, the Oscar-nominated director and his chef/author fiancee are indistinguishable from anyone else you see just trying to live day-to-day.

It's a promising concept, and with Spurlock also on tap for a TV Nation-type show this fall on Comedy Central (Oh, dear, God, let him PLEASE get the deliriously deadpan Louis Theroux for this one...), it looks like the polarizing figure of Michael Moore may gradually be supplanted by the affable, friendly, aw-shucks kid from West Virginia -- the one who SMILES as he neatly sticks the shiv into the backs of the powerful and the corrupt.