It’s a new year of “30 Days.” Morgan Spurlock’s I’ll-try-anything spirit infuses this FX reality series, which dispatches an explorer to experience 30 days in an alien world to see what lessons are waiting there.
Spurlock, host of the six-episode season, will also take the plunge for two of them. He will spend 30 days on a reservation with a Navajo family.
And for the premiere (11 p.m. Tuesday on FX), he returns to his West Virginia roots to live with a coal-mining family and spend 30 days as a rookie apprentice working in a coal mine.
The good news: Mining pays pretty well, an average of $60,000 a year.
The bad news: It’s still grueling and life-threatening work.
Respirators are furnished, but they’re hard to breathe through, so nobody uses them. The results are no surprise.
Spurlock persuades a career miner to join him in getting tested for black-lung disease. Spurlock tests negative; the other man tests positive.
Spurlock withholds any sweeping judgment on the coal industry, which provides for half of the nation’s energy needs.
“We have to use coal because we haven’t spent the time to invest in something better,” he says. But by spending 30 days with the people who mine it, he puts a human face on this energy resource. Coal may be affordable, but it doesn’t come cheap.
Other episodes in this, the series’ third season: An avid hunter spends 30 days living with an activist at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. And Ray Crockett, a former cornerback with the Broncos, spends 30 days in a wheelchair.
