30 Days

Morgan Spurlock (the “Supersize Me” guy) has a small series on FX called 30 Days, which purports to film people living for a month in a fashion opposite to their normal experience. In the first one, Spurlock and his fiancée, Alex Jamieson, move to Columbus, Ohio (my home town) to live on minimum wage jobs.

I saw it, and thought it was ok. The Washington Post says Nickel and Dimed covered the topic better, but hey, this is TV and People Don’t Read. I haven’t read Nickel and Dimed, so I can’t comment.

It was rather predictable. They live in a “hovel” that looks like a converted motel, complete with wonky heat and bugs. They walk or ride the bus to work. They have hard labor-intensive jobs. They can’t afford health care. They argue about money…

But as I think about it more, they made some choices that made their lives easier and harder at the same time.

The first choice was the city (harder). I’m not sure people would move to a strange city, unless there is some reason, such as there are absolutely no jobs available where you are, or you have connections there. Especially one in an area that is not booming. Spurlock mentioned the election, Ohio’s poor cities, and the current economic climate (not great) as reasons for choosing Ohio’s capital. To make this choice better, Spurlock should have either moved to Las Vegas (boomtown) or Beckley WVa (his hometown, where he has connections) to better simulate this choice of the working poor.

The second choice, given this city, is the location (easier). They stayed relatively close to downtown (near-West side, in The Bottoms) with apparently relatively frequent bus service. The Bottoms, by the way, aren’t called that because they’re bad. They’re in the flood plain of the Scioto River — the bottom lands that used to be the most agriculturally fertile after the annual floods.

Many of the working poor in Columbus live in the South end, which was recently noted to have the worst air quality in the city. There, however, busses are hard to come by and minimum wage jobs even harder. And there are no coffee-shops (of the latté variety) within walking distance of the (probably cheaper) housing there. Plus, there you can only get groceries at the local corner mart (at inflated prices), unless you have a way to drive to the Kroger.

Careful choice of the neighborhood will affect your ability generate and live on a small income. But by choosing not to move into a known support system of friends and relations, Spurlock & Jamieson effectively cut off one of the most common ways of the working poor for “getting by.” That, in the end, is what makes this TV show just a TV show and not really a look in what it’s like to be poor, though working, in America.


p.s. They sure got around a lot: German Village (south — signified by Zingerman’s wannabe Katzingers), Clintonville (north — shown early on), Franklin Park (east — the conservatory they didn’t go in), Hilltop (west — where they put back a bottle of water. puh-leeze.) And what’s interesting, they didn’t mention OSU at all, even though The Blue Nile (Alex's birthday dinner) is near to the campus.