30 Days Reaction... Part I

We all know what it is like to be sitting at home, looking through the channels on television and finding nothing to watch, especially in the summer. It seems these days that all reality shows are the same, “Who Wants To Be a Millionaire”, “Survivor”, and “The Real World”. I have this stereotype in my head that all reality shows are all staged and are only on television for the drama. What changed some of these thoughts in my head was watching a show on the reality series “30 Days”.

“30 days” is a reality series that airs on FX at 10 o’clock at night. This is one of the better hours for TV shows in the summer. “30 Days” has to compete with other sitcoms and reality shows, and I honestly believe it has great odds of beating other shows out. The target audience would be young and older adults because they would have a better understanding of stereotypes and closely heated debates. Morgan Spurlock is the creator of “30 Days”. You may know him from his movie “Super size Me”, where he put his own body on the line, living on nothing but McDonald's food for an entire month. He is known for putting himself or other people in situations that are outside their comfort zone. “30 Days” a documentary/reality show because Spurlock documents people’s life changing experiences while they are living in other people’s shoes for a whole month. The subjects he usually focuses on are minimum wage, religion, sexual orientation, and jail.

The episode “Immigration” was about a patriotic minuteman, someone who keeps illegal aliens out of United States, named Frank George who moves in with a family of illegal aliens for thirty days. One way that they made this episode more emotional was by having the male be a legal immigrant from Cuba, which was able to speak Spanish with the Gonzalez family from central Mexico. Frank lived in a small house with a family consisting of seven members of which only the two youngest being American citizens. Frank makes it very clear that if you did not enter this country legally that you should be departed back to your own country and this tended to make conversations tense.

One of the big eye openers of the show was watching what the parents, Rigo and Patty, did for a living and how much they got paid. Rigo was a maintenance man at one of the apartments near their house, where he was only paid 15,000 dollars a year. Rigo wanted to open up his own business so that there would be more jobs for immigrants in the United States. Yet, he is unable to fulfill this dream because he is an illegal immigrant. I respect Rigo for his ambitions and wanting to make the world a better place. We tend to think illegal immigrants as being lazy, and this proves he has ambitions and wants to make things better here. He states that he does the jobs that no American would want to do, but I think that in some ways they are still taking some of our jobs here, because I am sure that some American citizen would be a maintenance man if it got him off the streets. Patty on the other hand separates recyclable for only five dollars total. This also makes me realize that she is not lazy and is willing to work, yet can only find a job that pays nothing. She still goes to work everyday so she can buy Christmas presents for her family.