30 Days DVD Credits:

Region: 1

30 Days DVD Release Date: 17th July 2006

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30 Days DVD Review:

Time after time again I have watched fluke hits sucked dry in order to make more money out of them. As in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath when the land is killed with cotton crops in order to make a quick buck before the land completely dries and dies, many studios will take a dying trend and beat audiences over the head until it is dead. It happened with the ill-fated sequel to The Blair Witch Project as well as the horrific television spin-off of My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Even the new Pirates movie fits in this category if you ask me. Morgan Spurlock created quite a buzz with Super Size Me, which also opened all kinds of opportunity for him. When he decided to ride on the same gimmick and have a show with every episode essentially having the same concept as his film with different topics, I assumed it to be killed before the season ended. In fact, 30 Days may have saved reality television. Finally there is a reality television program that actually resembles reality, and it makes you think as well.

The show is essentially simple. Take a regular everyday person and put them in a situation they are unfamiliar with for thirty days. It is almost a self help show, in many ways broadening each individual life, and multiple more as each episode is viewed. The pilot starts the season with he only experiment that Morgan Spurlock went on himself, this time with his fiancé. They live for thirty days on minimum wage, which gets somewhat hairy when each of them has to go to the emergency room without insurance. From there each episode has a new volunteer going into a thirty day experiment. A devout Christian goes to live with a group of Muslims and learn their customs. A straight man lives in the Castro District of San Francisco, and a mom binge drinks like her college-age daughter.

What makes each episode great is the fact that the people on the show are very real. All of the reality programming has been turned into a game show, and often they filter in people who are likely to cause a problem, because regular life isn’t exciting enough for us. On 30 Days each of the people are regular people. They are intelligent and often likable people. They also each have flaws, but this is because they are real. All there is to win on this show is a higher way of thinking.

The six episodes are put on two discs, each set in one regular DVD case, for a compact buy. The special features are simple, but solid enough. There are audio commentaries on four of the six episodes, and extra diary cams for each episode.

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30 Days DVD review written by: Ryan Izay