Spurlock super in ‘30 Days’; Filmmaker creates great reality TV by pairing folks with opposite views

Sharon Jones sings that it takes 100 days and 100 nights to know a man’s heart.

Well, with this season of "30 Days" we will have seen documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock spend one month apiece taking part in the following fish-out-of-water activities: working a minimum wage job, serving time in a county jail, mining coal underground in West Virginia and living on an Indian reservation.

Not counting the McMonth he spent gorging on Quarter Pounders and fries for his breakout film, "Super Size Me," Spurlock has spent 120 days way, way out of his comfort zone.

And in that time, I must admit, I’ve totally come around on the dude. I found Spurlock off-putting in "Super Size Me." He struck me as an exhibitionist trying to cover the same ground Eric Schlosser did in Fast Food Nation, but in a lowbrow gross-out aimed at kids who couldn’t be bothered to read Schlosser’s superb book.

For "30 Days," Spurlock was paired with an accomplished docu-guru, R.J. Cutler ("American High"), and the results have been much more satisfying. Now with this third season, the FX series continues to move toward the top of my chart of all-time great reality shows. (Michael Moore’s "The Awful Truth" is No. 1, in case you’re wondering.)

Like the movie, each episode of "30 Days" features Spurlock or a handpicked volunteer spending a month immersed in a lifestyle far removed from their own. Social experiments like this are not new and have been much abused since the days of Black Like Me. (For a time, daytime talk shows couldn’t get enough of fat suits -- that is, until Tyra Banks tried one on.)

But Spurlock and Cutler have a knack for provocative pairings that make for great TV while genuinely seeming to change the lives of the people who take part in them. That’s no small feat considering that they won’t be getting a new house at the end of the hour. They just get to go back to their old house, though often the subjects have undergone their own personal renovation.

I wish I had been a fly on the wall of the first Minuteman meeting after one of its members returned from living 30 days with a family of illegal immigrants. At one point in that episode from Season 2, the hapless Minuteman is taken to Mexico to tour the hovel where the family once lived. Though he later backpedals, it’s clear from the look on his face that he, too, would’ve made a run for the border if this were his other option.

In this latest batch of experiments, ex-NFL star Ray Crockett, who won two rings with the Denver Broncos and ended his career with the Chiefs, will spend 30 days in a wheelchair.

Also, a hunting enthusiast will go live for a month with vegans, and a mom who opposes same-sex parenting will -- can you guess? -- spend quality time with two daddies and their kids.

The reason "30 Days" works is the same reason Spurlock’s latest movie, "Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden?" misses the mark. The film has a terrific title and premise (he tours the Middle East ostensibly "looking" for Public Enemy No. 1, but in reality he’s trying to show us how people in the Arab world live).

But "Where in the World" neither sets a realistic goal nor produces much empathy for the people Spurlock meets because he’s in such a hurry to move on to the next stop in his combination world tour and fool’s errand.

He’ll kick off the new season of "30 Days" on Tuesday by returning to his home state of West Virginia and working in a coal mine for a month. He soon learns it is, not surprisingly, grueling labor. "I felt like somebody beat me with a shovel for six hours straight," he says after his first day in the mine.

Besides a sooty face and sore muscles, however, Spurlock emerges with a newfound respect for the miners, many of whom would gladly quit if anything else in town paid $65,000 a year, and for the dilemma that they and their bosses are caught in. As a likable coal industry lobbyist tells him, "No one has got in their hip pocket a (different) way to supply half the country’s electricity."

In the season finale, he spends a month overcoming his misconceptions about American Indians while living among the Navajo Nation on a reservation in New Mexico.

I always thought Spurlock should appear in more episodes, and the doubling of his workload this season suggests that he and Cutler agree. His experiments have more of a devil-may-care quality to them. He’s careful not to be too hard on his guinea pigs, but when he’s the hamster, anything goes. In the coal mine, Spurlock tries wearing a dust mask to protect against black lung but ditches it after a few hours because he can’t get enough air to breathe while busting his hump.

If this were a Michael Moore film, we might see someone demanding that the government look into why the coal industry can’t make a dust mask that miners will actually want to use. But Spurlock seems a lot less interested in telling you what to think.

In his heart, I think he’d just like to get his audience to spend less time thinking about itself and more time thinking about others. Even if for a short period.

‘30 DAYS’

The third season of the Morgan Spurlock reality series begins 9 p.m. Tuesday on FX and airs for six weeks. Episodes from seasons 1 and 2 of "30 Days" are on DVD.