Did we need a new Dance Moms??

When the original girls from Dance Moms announced that they were having a reunion special, I took a trip down memory lane to watch the series from the beginning. I kept it playing in the background for awhile, but about halfway through season two I had to turn it off because I was so uncomfortable watching these little girls be verbally abused by an angry hypocrite who will tear anyone down at the expense of her favorite student. I was actually disappointed in myself because I watched every single episode of Dance Moms while it was airing and it never occurred to me that I shouldn’t have been.

When the reunion aired, I decided to tune in because I wanted to see if my discomfort with the show was warranted: how did the girls feel? were they affected? did they feel traumatized by Abby Lee Miller?

The short answer is, yes. Chloe especially had to work on her self confidence for years after she left the Abby Lee Dance Company because she had been the main target of Abby’s unfair treatment in favor of Maddie Ziegler. The show produced some girls who legitimately still have careers in entertainment thanks to the exposure they were able to get on Lifetime, but it was a bad show. I can’t think of a show that was more exploitative of children than Dance Moms.

So why are they doing it again??

It has been raining all week in NYC so I haven’t really felt like going anywhere, and that means lots of trash television. A full season of Dance Moms: A New Era dropped on Hulu yesterday and I’ve already watched most of it so you don’t have to. I have a few observations! Let’s start with the similarities between the New Era and the original show.

New dance teacher Glo Hampton fulfills the Abby Lee archetype.

We have a loud, overweight, gravelly-voiced dance teacher yelling at tiny little girls. From the very first episode, you can see the same dynamics setting up where Glo has a clear favorite and everyone else is expected to play second fiddle. The favorite, Audrey, just happens to be the daughter of Glo’s best friend Tammi, which is almost too reminiscent of Abby Lee’s favorite Maddie, whose mother worked the front desk of Abby’s studio. In one episode, Audrey gets hurt, and in the next episode, Glo tells the girls that she doesn’t think the team can win without her…while the team had just won without her when Audrey dropped out of a dance 10 minutes before they were supposed to go on stage.

The only Black girl has an overworked mother.

In the original run of Dance Moms, Dr. Holly Frazier was the only mother who consistently showed good sense. She was also the only mother who had to work. The others were either married to or dating men who seemed financially very well off. Dance is not a cheap sport, and Dr. Holly was forced to explain to these women week after week that she couldn’t go away to a competition because she had to work and her daughter, Nia, was penalized because her mother wasn’t serious enough about being a dance mom. Dr. Holly did in fact take a break from work later in the series, but it was interesting that the only Black woman on the show was the only one who had a career, and her daughter was almost always at the bottom of the pyramid. In the reboot, Leslie shows us in the first episode that she doesn’t have the same amount of time to devote to her daughter Leilah’s pursuit of dance because she has to work. Both mother and daughter have the least amount of screentime through the episodes, possibly because Leslie seems disinterested in engaging with the messy dynamics of the moms.

The mothers want to be famous.

I’ve read a few things about Dance Moms, original and New Era, and there is a sizable chunk of the viewers who watch the show because they love dance and they’re following the girls to see how they develop as artists. I’m not ashamed to say that the rest of us enjoy the dramatics of reality television. A show like this can’t survive solely on the viewership of people who want to see little girls at a dance recital — you have to pull in viewers who like trash TV as well. The moms are fulfilling that quota here as well. Accusations of jealousy, cursing, a physical altercation — these moms are bringing it just as hard as the original cast…because they want to be famous too. One of the mothers wants to be a social media lifestyle blogger. One was a dancer who didn’t get to pursue her passion. And now they’re on reality TV trying to get familys. The best way to get screentime on a reality TV show is to start a fight, so that’s what they’re doing. (And they’re pretty good at it too!)

There’s a pyramid, a new group dance each week, and an awards ceremony.

The beats of each episode are the same beats as the original episodes, so everything feels familiar. They start with the pyramid and then the girls get their assignments for the week. While the girls dance, we get footage of the moms discussing the dance (or discussing how much they dislike each other), and then they go to competition. We have pretty decent footage from each performance and then the requisite amount of drama while the competition organizers hand out prizes. There’s more discussing (or yelling) in the dressing room afterward, and then the episode is over. The formula worked before, and it still works.

So those are the familiar pockets of the show, but the New Era episodes do come with a few differences that make the show more watchable.

White girls are not the overwhelming majority.

Nia always stood out in a sea of white girls as the only Black girl on stage at their competitions, but that’s not the case anymore. Of the 7 (sometimes 8) girls on the team, only three of them are white. In one episode there was an entire trio composed of little brown girls which is fantastic for representation. I absolutely love when little girls can see themselves on their favorite shows, and this may be due to the dance teacher.

Real Dance Moms fans will recognize Glo from the original run: her daughter Kaeli was in talks to join Abby Lee’s team.

Today she’s a professional ballet dancer, and it was nice to see her come back to choreograph a dance for the girls at her mom’s studio.

Glo is much nicer to the girls.

In however many season of Dance Moms, I never once saw Abby Lee recognize the humanity in simply making a mistake and learning from it. One of Glo’s dancers has a breakdown over a side aerial that she didn’t complete, and Glo (correctly) pointed out that she didn’t even try. She told the girl, “it’s okay to make a mistake — it’s not okay to not even try.” That is a real coach!

In another episode, Leilah is frustrated about her solo because she can’t grasp the precise movement of her Janet Jackson routine, but Glo doesn’t yell at her. Glo tells her she can do it and sends her to her mother for a comforting break. She doesn’t call her dumb, doesn’t take the solo away from her, and doesn’t make her cry even more. Overall, Glo just seems to like children more than Abby Lee ever did.

Later in that episode, Leilah goofed on her costume change and she was distraught. While she was apologizing to her teacher, Glo cut her off and told her she had no reason to apologize, but to get better next time and not let things like that stress her out. A very refreshing change!

The favorite doesn’t always come out on top.

The dynamic between Glo, her favorite Audrey, and Audrey’s mom is really weird and hard to watch. We learn in one episode that Glo lives with the two of them (in the basement?!) which is such a clear conflict of interest if Glo is expected to be an impartial coach who shows equal amounts of attention to each student. It was Glo’s daughter (the guest choreographer one week) who made the most succinct observation when Audrey was almost certainly faking an injury because she was too nervous to perform a dance that was harder than she’s used to: Glo babies Audrey too much.

But it was Mina, an 8-year-old Chinese dancer, who found herself at the top of the pyramid three weeks in a row, not Audrey. For all of the concessions Glo is prepared to make for Audrey, it doesn’t seem to affect the amount of practice time, attention, or parts the other girls are able to participate in.

The girls are actually better dancers.

No shade at all! But the original Dance Moms was basically an accident. They wanted to do a show similar to Toddlers & Tiaras, where you have a different group of moms and daughters each episode. When they were filming in Pittsburgh, they realized they had a ready-made reality show with these moms who had history and were all batshit crazy. They had to work with the talent that was already sitting there in western Pennsylvania.

For the New Era, we do have moms/daughters from the studio who have a history with each other, but the show leads off with an open call for dancers who want to audition for this competition team. When you have families willing to uproot their entire lives to move to suburban Virginia to be on a television dance show, you have some real ringers. The dances are more impressive because the girls can handle more technical choreography. For anyone who has been a performer, it’s very cool to see these little girls displaying so much amazing talent.

Conclusion

Is Dance Moms: A New Era a great show? I don’t think it’s possible to put out a great reality show centered on children competing in something. It’s definitely less of a guilty pleasure than the original, but it’s not must-see viewing. If you’re not interested in either dance or Housewives-type dynamics, you can pass.

But if you are interested in either of those, you can watch the reboot with less concern about the girls coming back ten years later to film a special where they talk about how much therapy sought in order to overcome the trauma inflicted by their dance teacher.

Bonus: They managed to pull off a Janet Jackson / Beyonce solo complete with a quick costume change. If you want to catch my interest, that’s how you do it.