Pop Smart - Where’s my TiVo?

Last night was a great night for TV watching, particularly if you love informative filmmaking, but a horrible one if you don’t have TiVo. It was bad enough that Turner Classic Movies dedicated the evening to its “Race and Hollywood: Asian Images in Film,” which runs Tuesdays and Thursdays in June. The 35-film retrospective, hosted by Robert Osborne and University of Delaware professor Peter X. Feng, started with the 2006 documentary, Slanted Screen, and continued with screenings of The Cheat (1915), Broken Blossoms (1919), The Dragon Painter (1919), Mr. Wu (1927) and The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1932).

If you missed that history lesson, the series continues Thursday night with the 2008 documentary Anna May Wong — Frosted Yellow Willows: Her Life, Times and Legend, followed by The Toll of the Sea (1922), Old San Francisco (1927), and Piccadilly (1929).

But then there was the season-three premiere of Morgan Spurlock’s always-entertaining “30 Days” (F/X, 10 p.m. cable 43), which features the star/director of the thrilling Super-Size Me (and the near-woeful Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden?) spending a month in the lives of compelling characters and situations. To kick the season off, instead of placing someone else in a compromising position, Spurlock spent a month in his native West Virginia as a coal miner. It was, quite simply, great television, showing once again Spurlock at his best (offering a bird’s eye view of coal miners’ lives and humanizing them every step of the way) and his worst (his cloying voice-overs are as awkwardly delivered as his camera-facing confessionals are naive and obvious).

But as harsh as I’ve been on Spurlock, he does his fair share of digging, so to speak, and he paints a picture of a people addicted to the good-paying ($60,000 a year) yet lethal jobs that while charging our homes and lives also rape the beautiful West Virginia landscape. By the end of the hour, you really feel like you know the people better, and that in the end is Spurlock’s goal. (Next week: Morgan throws a dude into a wheelchair for a month.)