Potentially good reality TV
Tonight at 10pm is the premier of the show 30 Days on FX. It’s by Morgan Spurlock, the guy who did Supersize Me. In Supersize Me, he took 30 days to live the all-American fast food diet. Each episode of this show, he’ll follow himself or someone else living another experience for 30 days. For example, oie episode is about an evangelical Christian living in America’s largest Muslim community in Michigan for 30 days.
This is like a short documentary more than a standard reality TV show with its share of schadenfreude.
June 15th, 2005 at 3:42 pm
I dropped this into my tivo queue when I saw the ad for it. I’m pretty excited about the first episode, about living on minimum wage.
And of course, the nerd in me immediately started wondering about the production schedule. 30 days to make a single episode? It hasn’t been a full season’s worth of episodes since Super Size Me came out. Either way, that’s a hectic schedule, and a ton of footage to wade through in the editing room.
June 15th, 2005 at 3:58 pm
1) Morgan’s not in all of the episodes so they can be filmed cocurrently.
2) Currently they have six episodes for the summer. It’s been at least 6 months since Supersize Me came out.
3) That is a ton of editting.
June 18th, 2005 at 8:33 am
So I watched the first episode – it’s pretty darn good. A lot of what they talked about was (at least to me) pretty self-evident, but it was pretty powerful to see them have to actually live on almost no money – especially when it came to health care.