You Know What TV Needs? More Dancing
Okay, I KNOW there’s dancing on television. I know that So You Think You Can Dance and Dancing With The Stars and America’s Got Talent are things that, like, exist. But as much as I love unscripted television, for whatever reason reality dance shows are just not my favorite television tango partners.
No, what I love is dancing on scripted shows. Like, super-choreographed dances that I can pause and play and pause and play until I’ve learned every move. Glee has been giving me choreography since it danced its way onto the airwaves, but lately a ton of not-particularly-musically-inclined shows have been giving me some dance numbers and I have been eating up the entertainment with a spoon and a fork.
Did we all watch this past season of Girls on our parents’ HBOGo accounts? (Or do some of us have real HBO set up in their households like full-blown adults, if so, you are impressive, please teach me everything you know.) My absolute favorite episode of the show this year was the one where the girls go to Marnie’s mom’s beach house and run into Elijah and his friends and LEARN A BROADWAY DANCE. I had to suspend my disbelief so hard because this sequence literally just felt too fun for real life.
Or did we catch the first season of MTV’s new comedy Faking It earlier this year? The show was already batting a thousand and then in the final episode, our protagonists Karma and Amy did a choreographed dance to Paula Abdul’s “Straight Up.” It was so awesome I died, I literally died, and I still have no idea how I came back to life.
And of all the myriad amaze moments The Mindy Project gave us this year—what was more amaze than Danny Castellano giving Mindy her Secret Santa present and the gift turning out to be Danny doing a dance to Aaliyah’s Try Again? Which reminds me, I need to tell my husband to not get me like books or whatever for Christmas this year because all I really want is for him to do a dance to a song I liked when I was fourteen.
So why am I so obsessed with fictional characters busting out the choreography? I got real with myself and realized that the reason I love dance popping up in story lines is because I so wish dance would pop up more often in the story line of my life. I’m going to a wedding this weekend, and a bunch of the bride and groom’s friends have been regularly rehearsing a choreographed dance for the couple for the reception and it has been TOO MUCH FUN. It’s just the greatest having a little bit of dance be a part of regular, everyday life. It reminds me of being in high school and doing musicals after school.
All this is to say, a whole new year of scripted television is upon us (because even in the age of a million billion cable shows, everyone knows that the television year starts with Network September) and my fingers are crossed for a LOT of dancing. Television, you let me live vicariously through the perfect hair and amped up teen-hyperspeak of your characters, take pity on a humble viewer and throw some more dance moves my way this year?
