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Walk a mile in another man's shoes. See how the other half lives. Choose your cliché. Humans have always been interested in people different from themselves, even if only to disapprove of what they don't understand.

Morgan Spurlock's series "30 Days" – a documentary/reality hybrid that spins off his hit film "Super Size Me" – uses the idea of conflicting ways of life to examine hot-button social issues.

In an episode in the first season (now out on DVD), a devout Christian moves in with a Muslim family for a month. In another, a homophobe immerses himself in San Francisco's gay culture. And in perhaps the most extreme experiment, a worried mother embarks on a drinking binge to convince her daughter to slow down her own alcohol consumption.

This last experiment, heartbreakingly, doesn't work. The clash of cultures episodes do, as when the 24-year-old former youth minister living in San Francisco's Castro District witnesses first-hand what prejudices gay men face.

While the six-episode first season was just released on DVD, the second season will start airing this July on the FX channel .

Fast Food and Minimum Wage

Spurlock himself stars in the first episode of "30 days," as he tries to survive on minimum wage with his fiancé, Alex, echoing the movie that put him on the map. In "Super Size Me," he lived on food from McDonald's for a month to prove the deadliness of the diet – a diet, he argued, many of the poor have little choice but to embrace.

In "Minimum Wage," Spurlock systematically lays out the difficulties of life on $10,000 a year. As in "Super Size Me," he's a statistics freak, educating the audience with a detailed history of the subject.

Smart and resourceful, he and his fiancé get by for awhile, until he hurts his wrist holding down two manual-labor jobs and has to visit the emergency room.

Behind bars in Henrico, Spurlock is treated like every other inmate. Craig Blankenhorn – FX

Social Consciousness

Boomers, the generation that grew up on social consciousness, will relate to these stories, which also include a former athlete who goes on a dangerous anti-aging regimen to lose weight and gain back his sex drive.

Spurlock, only 36, is representative of a new generation of filmmaker-activists with a point of view. He's also a bit of a ham, directly addressing the camera with his feelings and experiences.

But these aren't one-sided profiles. The homophobe and the Christian are portrayed sympathetically. In "Minimum Wage," Spurlock is after a rounded look at life below the poverty line, showing some of the social-service systems that make an admittedly hard existence a little easier.

The series is reminiscent of the fine ABC reality show "Wife Swap," in which moms from opposite backgrounds switch families for two weeks. It's the kind of television that is both entertaining and illuminating.

Manuel Mendoza is a Dallas freelance journalist and producer of the upcoming documentary, "Stop the Presses: The American Newspaper in Peril."

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