"30 Days" with Spurlock, 13 nights with meerkats

TV Lookout |

It's a new year of "30 Days."

Morgan Spurlock's "I'll-try-anything" spirit infuses this FX 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 also take the plunge for two of them. He will spend 30 days on a reservation with a Navajo family.

And for the premiere (airing Tuesday at 10 p.m.), 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.

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.)

Other episodes in this, the series' third season: An avid hunter spends 30 days living with an activist at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. And former NFL player Ray Crockett spends 30 days in a wheelchair.

Other shows to look out for:

Road trip! Four young Arabs set out across the U.S. for a 12-part documentary series airing on Sundance Channel. Originally produced for Middle East television, "On the Road in America" is a journey toward a better understanding of two cultures. The travelers include Ali, an Egyptian who is studying accounting in Cairo, Egypt; Sanad, a Saudi at the American University in Dubai, United Arab Emirates; Mohamed, a Jordanian who has completed medical studies in Beirut, Lebanon; and Lara, a young Palestinian who lives in Beirut and is serving as a member of the film's production team.

Traveling by RV in summer 2006, cast and crew take time during their 10-week odyssey to stop off in New York, Chicago, the Mississippi Delta, Los Angeles and California. The series premieres Wednesday at 9 p.m.

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, "Meerkat Manor," which finds the Whiskers clan in disarray after the death last season of its matriarch, Flower. "Meerkat Manor: The Next Generation" premieres the first of its 13 episodes on Animal Planet at 9 p.m. Friday. Stockard Channing is the series' new narrator.

Oscar-winner Jessica Lange plays a psychiatrist who helps her client heal a psyche splintered into 16 separate, distinct personalities in the new TV film "Sybil." It's based on the best-selling nonfiction book by Flora Rheta Schreiber (which also inspired a 1976 TV film starring Joanne Woodward and Sally Field).

In this version, Tammy Blanchard stars as Sybil, who, with the help of her doctor, begins the road to recovery by reconstructing the abuses inflicted on her as a child by her mentally disturbed mother (played by JoBeth Williams). The film airs Saturday at 8 p.m. on CBS.