Morgan Spurlock has done an excellent job with this show. You may remember his film Super-Size Me. In that film he spent an entire month where he ate nothing but food from McDonalds and used a pedometer to reduce his physical activity to that of the average suburban American. There were interesting consequences. The basic premise for "30 Days" is that Spurlock or a random participant will live a different life for a month. It's an eye opening show.
First of all this is not your typical reality show. There are no extreme stereotyped folks thrown together. The episode I watched featured a man named David from West Virginia. He spent a month living with a Muslim family in Dearborn, MI. David learned a lot about Islam and a lot about American diversity in general. As a WASP he'd never experienced discrimination before. He seemed to learn what that is like. I hope the show taught some people a little about their own prejudices.
RATING: 4/5
I saw the pilot for this show because it was on right after the AFC Championship game (poor Stillers). I must say as a math geek, I was intrigued. The show is quite interesting. The pilot episode was very straightforward... math was used to solve a crime except that an obvious point was overlooked in the creation of the mathematical model.
The second episode is probably a better look at what this series will be about. It's not really about using mathematics to solve crimes. It's about two brothers. One is an FBI agent (played by the super-sexy Rob Morrow) and his little brother is a professional mathematician. This episode seemed to have more to do with how these two very different people react to the hurdles of crime solving. The mathematician predicts that a couple of bank robbers (who have never used violence before in the MO) will strike a particular location. When the FBI confronts them at the robbery several people are killed because they have many others working with them and they have car bombs set up and stuff. The mathematician doesn't want to help his brother anymore because he feared that his brother could have been killed.
My Rating: 3.5/5