Spoiler Alert: This review has a few ideas in it. If you liked the show, you won't like them, so just downvote the review and move on because you'll never get back the 5-50 minutes you spend reading the rest. For those still here, World of Dance is not actually a show about dance. How do I know? Well I just finished watching the first 3 episodes, and I swear they skipped more dancing thanSpoiler Alert: This review has a few ideas in it. If you liked the show, you won't like them, so just downvote the review and move on because you'll never get back the 5-50 minutes you spend reading the rest. For those still here, World of Dance is not actually a show about dance. How do I know? Well I just finished watching the first 3 episodes, and I swear they skipped more dancing than they showed. By "skipped" I mean showed for 5 seconds then flashed the score to leave more time for the important stuff.
The important stuff: the celebrity judges, the moral lessons, and the feeeeeeeelings. The judges on the show are no worse than celebrities on any other show. They have some talent, though nothing commensurate with the worship they receive from the crowd and the performers, not to mention the air time they eat up. I like dance, so I would rather watch my grandmother do the twist after a few too many sherries than watch Jennifer Lopez grab the hands of her male co-stars and feign rapture, and I certainly don't want the camera to cut away from GOOD dancing to show me this beatitude, but it does. There's also plenty of time for one judge or another to hop up on stage and demonstrate a move, whereupon the actual contestants drop to the ground in reverence as though Thor has just promised them Sweden AND Denmark. The message is clear: celebrities matter so much that every little self-aggrandizing gesture is worth preempting dance for. Watch them, adore them, let them distract you.
The moral lessons are the usual ones. For example, this show loves underdog dance troupes. I mean who doesn't? Folks who "come from nowhere," get together to share a common passion and become like family chasing their big break, and we get to watch as they either make it or fall heart-wrenchingly short. This is just the latest version of the Horatio Alger myth, and it's supposed to convince you that any kid with a dream can reach the big time. If you actually look at the entertainment industry, however, you can't miss the fact that the normal route to stardom these days is nepotism and/or big money. It is eight million times better to be mildly talented and have a relative in the business than it is to be massively talented and know nobody. In other words, this moral lesson, while it may FEEL inspirational, is designed to keep you from looking too closely at how the world actually works.
Speaking of feelings. Ugh, the show never shuts up about them. The one "truth" it flogs mercilessly is that the greatest dancers have to feel the feelings they're dancing in the moment in order to convey those feelings to the audience. Using this logic, whoever has the most backstage feelings will give the most successful performance, so the show has to devote lots of time to showing us those backstage feelings, which are generally in the love area with extra points for undeserved suffering. The problem is that the show has the feelings thing all wrong. Yes, a great performance has a strong emotional impact, but strong feeling on the part of the dancer during the dance is more likely to get in the way of that impact than make it happen. Thom Yorke once said that singers who try to feel their feelings while they're singing about them, rather than think about the feelings of the audience are being self-indulgent. But TV reveres feeling above all else because . . . oh, come on, you can guess, right? If you can't, well, I guess shows like World of Dance have done their job.
A final note: my score is 3 because the show does have some impressive dancing.… Expand
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