It’s a new year of “30 Days.”
Morgan Spurlock’s “I’ll-try-anything” spirit infuses this reality series, which dispatches an explorer to experience 30 days in an alien world to see what lessons are waiting there.
Spurlock, host of the six-episode season, will take the plunge for two of them.
For the premiere, he returns to his West Virginia roots to live with a coal-mining family and spend 30 days as a rookie apprentice working in a coal mine.
Airing: 10 p.m. Tuesday on FX.
The good news: Mining pays pretty well, an average of $60,000 a year.
The bad news: It’s still grueling and life-threatening. Respirators are furnished, but they’re hard to breathe through, so nobody uses them. The results are no surprise.
Spurlock persuades a career miner to join him in getting tested for black-lung disease. Spurlock tests negative. The other man tests positive.
Shows to watch for
“Meerkat Manor”: There’s dissent in the ranks. There’s rivalry for the leadership position. So begins the fourth season of TV’s most unlikely reality show, which finds the Whiskers clan in disarray after the death last season of its matriarch, Flower.
Rocket Dog has claimed the top spot in the family — but her sister and challenger Maybelline has ditched the clan to form her own tribe, the Aztecs.
Stockard Channing is the series’ new narrator.
Airs: “Meerkat Manor: The Next Generation” premieres the first of its 13 episodes at 9 p.m. Friday on Animal Planet.
“Sybil”: Oscar-winner Jessica Lange plays a psychiatrist who helps her client heal a psyche splintered into 16 distinct personalities in the new TV film
Based on the best-selling book by Flora Rheta Schreiber, this is the true story of a young woman who suffers from dissociative identity disorder, a psychological condition where two or more distinct personalities exist within the same person as the result of severe childhood trauma.
The book also inspired a 1976 TV film starring Joanne Woodward and Sally Field.
In this version, Tammy Blanchard stars as Sybil, who begins the road to recovery by reconstructing the abuses inflicted on her as a child by her mentally disturbed mother, played by JoBeth Williams.
Airs: 8 p.m. Saturday on CBS.
“The Next Food Network Star”: Alton Brown takes on a crop of 10 new contestants vying for their own series.
Airs: 10 p.m. today, Food Network.
“The Mole”: Jon Kelley presides over a set of all-new missions infested with a saboteur.
Airs: 10 p.m (Monday, ABC:
Season finale
“The Tudors”: Henry (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) proposes to Wife No. 3, Jane Seymour.
Airs: 9 tonight, Showtime.
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