“Gasland,” a documentary making its television premiere on HBO on Monday night after winning a special jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival, is maddening in several distinct ways.

The first is the way its director, Josh Fox, intended. If you are predisposed to distrust big business and the bureaucrats who regulate it, then “Gasland,” a soberly muckracking film about the health and environmental dangers of the current nationwide rush to drill for natural gas, will light a flame in you. It might resemble the flames Mr. Fox films sprouting from people’s kitchen faucets or from the surfaces of polluted creeks, in places where methane has turned water into a fire hazard.

Mr. Fox lives in northeastern Pennsylvania above the vast Marcellus Shale formation, which has been much in the news the last few years as energy companies have rushed to sink wells employing the controversial technique of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, in which millions of gallons of water and chemicals are pumped underground to extract natural gas trapped in the shale. The film came about, he says on screen, when he received an offer from a company to lease his 19.5 acres with an upfront payment of nearly $100,000. Rather than take the money, he begins investigating stories he has heard of ruined water wells and sickened families in nearby Dimock Township.

From there he heads west, visiting landowners and drill sites in states like Colorado and Wyoming, where fracking has been practiced for years. Wherever he goes he finds flammable, foul-smelling water, sick people and animals, and families who no longer use their wells but truck in all their household water (usually bought at Wal-Mart). In some cases oil companies provide the water after settling lawsuits.