With his unruly handlebar goatee, pale visage and slicked-back hair, Morgan Spurlock looks like the friendliest (and thinnest) biker you’d ever meet. But of course, looks aren’t everything, and surface appearances often give way to deeper, enmeshing similarities — as well as substantive differences — that collectively say a lot more about our culture and ethical mores than we might ever expect.

Spurlock, of course, first came to notoriety with his documentary Super Size Me, in which he willfully gorged himself on all manner of McDonald’s food (and only McDonald’s food) for an entire month. But whereas that film gaily used its self-destruction as a sort of teaching mechanism, Spurlock’s latest project is a bit more tinged with lamentation and earnestness. 30 Days finds its subjects — including Spurlock himself — trading in a certain lifestyle to explore a social or religious issue from another point of view for a month. While its form and rules are a bit roughhewn and amorphous, shifting to suit the need of whatever topic is under the microscope, the short-order summer television series is ultimately an infinitely better exploration of the sort gulfs between cultural subsets than FX’s own Black & White.

In the show’s pilot, Spurlock and his girlfriend Alex move from New York to the Midwest to try to make ends meet on the federal minimum wage — $5.15 per hour — but face difficulty both when they have to go to the doctor and Spurlock’s niece and nephew come to visit them. Two other top episodes send a devout Christian into a Muslim family and a homophobic youngster to live and work in San Francisco’s largely gay Castro district, where they experience what it’s like to live as members of a minority that sometimes still elicit feelings of fear and/or revulsion from many Americans. Other episodes follow an athlete who tries to reverse the aging process by going on a controversial anti-aging drug regimen; a mother concerned about her college-aged daughter who goes on a month-long drinking binge to experience firsthand the social pressures and physical effects of such partying; and “Off the Grid,” in which two overly enthusiastic American consumers repair to a Missouri “eco village,” where they do without many of the comforts of their material world and live without the use of products derived from fossil fuels.

Presented in a regular Amray case with a snap-in tray, the double-disc 30 Days includes audio commentary on four of the six episodes and an abundance of extra “diary cam” footage for each program. More strictly educational material could have been included, but these confessionals form the emotive narrative backbones of each show, and in their honesty instill a certain hope about the nature of open-mindedness moving forward. Each episode is presented in 1.33:1 full frame, with optional subtitles in English and Spanish. B (Show) C+ (Disc)