A few more ideas to digest

MORGAN SPURLOCK insists he isn’t trying to super-size journalism or advocate from a super-sized soapbox. He says he’s not interested in becoming an obnoxious gadfly or the next Michael Moore.

But a year after Spurlock super-sized his way to an Oscar nomination and book deal (“Don’t Eat This Book” was just released by G.P. Putnam’s Sons) by devouring McDonald’s fare three times a day for 30 days, the director, star and writer of “Super Size Me” is taking on the small screen, he says, to “pluck people out of their own backyards, send them out into the unknown and hopefully change some minds along the way.”

“30 Days,” a documentary-style reality show that premieres Wednesday on FX, follows along for a month as Americans trade in their lives for ones radically different from their own.

Spurlock and his fiancee, Alex Jamieson, swap their Manhattan lifestyle for a stint in Columbus, Ohio, where they both work minimum-wage jobs; Scott Bridges, a Los Angeles husband and father, undergoes an anti-aging regime that includes taking steroids because he wants to look like he did in high school; David Stacy, a Christian family man from West Virginia moves in with a Muslim family in Dearborn, Mich.; Michiel Nacke of Tempe, Ariz., binge drinks to teach her children about the dangers of alcohol; Ryan Hickmott of Oxford, Mich., moves in with a gay man in San Francisco to deal with his homophobia; and Johari Jenkins of Jersey City, N.J., and Vito Summa of New York City live without electricity and modern conveniences in an eco-village in rural Missouri.

“I have a whole laundry list of things that I think need to be fixed in America, or at least examined so that people can start to think about them,” said the 34-year-old Spurlock, who hosts and narrates the series. “I’ve had so many people come up to me and say that after watching ‘Super Size Me,’ they’ve changed the way they are eating. Parents are cooking more for their kids, school systems are voting all of their junk food out of their cafeterias, and you see how it has empowered people. Hopefully, this show will do the same thing: to make people say, ‘I need to think more about that’ or ‘I need to become more active in my community’ or ‘I need not to be so judgmental off the bat.’ ”

FX’s signature dramas -- “The Shield,” “Nip/Tuck” and “Rescue Me” -- examine the price of justice, the national obsession with youth, and life after Sept. 11, respectively, albeit through a fictional prism. So it fits that the network is fashioning its reality offerings with the same strategy, said John Landgraf, president and general manager of FX Networks. Indeed, “30 Days” moves the basic cable network past the contrived shenanigans of last year’s “Todd TV” into the experiential storytelling that turned “Super Size Me” into the third-highest-grossing box office documentary in history.

“The reality business in general seems to us to be a little cheesy, hyped-up,” Landgraf said. “For me, to find the unscripted equivalent of our scripted brand, it had to aspire to be high-end from a filmmaking and storytelling standpoint. And we wanted to go after something that feels more real and deals with contemporary American themes and issues.”

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Striking a chord

The idea for “30 Days” struck Spurlock as he was editing “Super Size Me” and thought about the debate his McDonald’s-based documentary had sparked just at the test screenings.

“People started arguing with one another and I thought, ‘This is fantastic -- to evoke emotion like that,’ ” Spurlock said. “That’s what good films do; good films really make you feel. So we were sitting in the edit room and I thought it would be great to create a show for television where we can deal with serious issues in a fun way that isn’t preachy.”

Spurlock pitched the documentary-style reality show in February 2004 to FX executives who immediately went for the concept. They helped Spurlock narrow his “huge list” of topics to a half-dozen to produce this year and bought six episodes.

“I love that FX jumped on it because we’re taking reality television back to its roots: documentary films,” Spurlock said. “Nobody wins, nobody gets voted off, and we’re dealing with real issues in our society every day.”

Executing the concept, however, became a challenge. “30 Days” isn’t serialized like most reality shows. Each episode plays out like a short film, with Spurlock as its engaging common denominator. Spurlock and his production team -- R.J. Cutler of the Oscar-nominated “The War Room” and Ben Silverman and H.T. Owens of “The Biggest Loser” and “Blow Out” -- studied the structure of “Super Size Me” to see how they could best emulate it for television.

“It was easy to analyze that there was this experiential journalism,” Cutler said. “You don’t really see that, even in the films of Michael Moore; he’s poking fun at different people and communicating with the audience. Morgan is immersing himself in another person’s life and another world. So we decided every episode is going to have this experiential journalism spine and the nerves that wrap around the spine is Morgan exploring an issue.”

Inquisitiveness is a trait Spurlock says he can’t help. His mother, a lover of art, music and writing, wrote poetry and read it to her three sons when they were young, encouraging them to find their own voices. As a result, Spurlock, who always loved movies, decided early on that he was going to become a filmmaker. His older brothers became ballet dancers.

“I grew up in a family of ballet-dancing brothers in the middle of West Virginia, which was not the coolest thing to be doing in West Virginia,” Spurlock said. “They both became professional dancers. Now they have kids and are married, but to grow up at that time in that place in a family that was so supportive of the arts was unheard of.... I learned how not to be afraid and go after the things you wanted.”

That attitude served him well after Sept. 11, when his Internet production company fell apart because MTV stopped production on a show Spurlock was working on and the Internet-boom fallout. More than $250,000 in debt, he was evicted from his apartment and slept in a hammock in his office for five months.

A TV news tidbit about obesity provided the kernel for “Super Size Me,” but Spurlock never dreamed that his first documentary would lead to a TV series and book deals for him and his fiancee.

Spurlock -- who gained 25 pounds and suffered liver damage during his experiment -- credits Jamieson, a vegan chef, for his return to good health by designing an eight-week detoxification diet.

“I was so horrified that he was going to eat McDonald’s for 30 days straight that I couldn’t think clearly about the movie,” said Jamieson, 30, who imparts her knowledge in “The Great American Detox Diet,” which was released by Rodale Books last week. “The whole reason I went to culinary school was to learn about healing and food and helping people get better with their diets, and he comes back with this idea.”

For “30 Days,” Spurlock decided to delve into the topic of the federal minimum wage, which he emphasizes has remained at $5.15 since 1997, and Jamieson, who didn’t want to be away from her fiance for a month, joined him. During the course of a month, Jamieson worked in a coffee shop while Spurlock worked in construction, washed dishes, made pizzas and helped in a print shop. After both of them wound up in an urgent care clinic -- Jamieson for a urinary tract infection and Spurlock for a wrist injury -- their bills mounted.

“It was eye-opening to see how many people are out there working not just full time but double time,” Jamieson said. “It’s amazing that people are able to sustain healthy relationships and a family life when they have to work so hard away from home and there are such big transportation difficulties ... at the same time, it was unbelievable to see how many really good people there are out there.”

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Inclusion meets suspicion

David Stacy, who grew up with Spurlock, learned that lesson in Dearborn, Mich., after living for a month with a Muslim couple and experiencing every aspect of their religion and culture.

“Unfortunately, my views before, I’m kind of embarrassed to say, my thinking had been pretty shallow,” said Stacy, 35, whose wife is Filipino. “I had never thought what it must be like to live in America as a minority.”

Stacy’s powerful episode, which FX will air third in the series, charts his entire journey, including his discomfort with praying five times a day to a “different God,” learning another language and reading the Koran, and coping with the discrimination he faced every day from those who despised him because they thought he was Muslim and from Muslims who didn’t trust his motivations.

Stacy’s uneasiness with his decision to go through with the experiment began when Spurlock gave him Muslim garb to wear to the airport.

“When I went to the airport -- and I do fly pretty frequently -- people were terrified of me,” he said. “I was freaking out people. These little old ladies wouldn’t look at me. It was the first time I’ve ever had people look at me and not just think I’m a little different, but hate me.”

After returning home in August, Stacy said he felt like he was in a “dream world” and “it took me another 30 days to reassimilate.”

“I had so many new thoughts,” he said. “I started to look at how we Americans can be so arrogant. While I was there, I didn’t have my normal support systems of friends, family and cellphone. At night, I didn’t watch any TV. It was just me with my thoughts for 30 days. It seemed kind of maddening, but I was like a lot of Americans who didn’t look at the issues.

“I have changed. I’m rubbing some people the wrong way now, and some people feel I’ve been brainwashed. But this show opened my eyes to so much.”