30 Days/Minimum Wage

Minimum Wage
Season 1, Episode 1
Airdate	June 15, 2005
← 1x01 Minimum Wage	1x02 → Anti-Aging
30 Days — Season One

Minimum Wage is the first episode of the first season of 30 Days, and the first episode overall.

Morgan and his fiancée, Alex, move to Columbus, OH, to live in poverty. The two get multiple minimum wage jobs and attempt to survive when faced with bills, children and unexpected medical ailments.

Guest Stars:

Notes

Subject Profile

Morgan Spurlock's 2004 film Super Size Me—which chronicled his month-long, McDonald's-only diet—is the third highest-grossing box office documentary of all time. The film garnered Spurlock an Academy Award nomination for Outstanding Documentary Feature, was a National Board of Review and Critic's Choice Best Documentary nominee and was included on over 35 year-end "Top Ten" lists from film critics across the country. Spurlock won the Best Director prizes at both the Sundance Film Festival and the Edinburgh Film Festival for the fast food expose.

In 2005, Spurlock became the first recipient of the inaugural Writers Guild of America (WGA) Award for Best Screenplay for a Non-Fiction Film for Super Size Me. An educationally enhanced DVD version of the film is now available to schools to assist students in making healthy food choices.

Spurlock's first book, Don't Eat This Book (Penguin Books) was released in May 2005 and picks up where Super Size Me left off, revealing how the film affected consumers, the fast-food industry as well as Spurlock and his family.

30 Days is Spurlock's second television series. His first TV series (MTV's I Bet You Will, which premiered in 2002) was the first ever to make the jump from Internet to television. The profits he made from producing 53 editions of the reality game show were used to produce Super Size Me.

An accomplished playwright, Spurlock won the Audience Award at the 1998 New York International Fringe Festival for his first feature length play, The Phoenix. This work also won Spurlock the Outstanding Playwright prize at the Route 66 National Playwright Competition in 1999.

Originally from West Virginia, Spurlock graduated from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts in 1993 and resides in Manhattan with his fiancée, Alexandra Jamieson.

Reviews

• Overall Grade: A+ with 1 review
• Review Breakdown: A+: 1 A: 0 A-: 0 B+: 0 B: 0 B-: 0 C+: 0 C: 0 C-: 0 D: 0 F: 0

• Morgan Spurlock's experiment in serializing a concept like Super Size Me hits the ground running with a fascinating and emotionally grabbing episode about the perils of living below the poverty line. The facts are presented in a way that is entertaining and informative without coming off as patronizing or biased and Morgan's narration adds a degree of comedy to an otherwise dramatic show. The occasional illustrated example of what he's talking about is also appreciated. By the end of the episode, the viewer understands how hopeless Morgan and Alex feel after realizing that even though they managed to break even with their housing costs, the hospital bills sent them so far under that they couldn't hope to survive comfortably. A+ IndieRockLance 01:04, 29 Jul 2005 (CST)