We Don’t Need a New Era of Dance Moms
Photo Courtesy of Hulu
With all of Hollywood digging around for popular franchises to reboot, not even reality television is safe. In the industry’s latest attempt to recycle old IP, Hulu has put forward the offering of Dance Moms: A New Era, the latest attempt to launch a successful Dance Moms series without the infamous Abby Lee Miller at the helm. Instead, Gloria “Glo” Hampton will be taking charge with her team of tween girls from her studio in Ashburn, Virginia. But with the history behind the Dance Moms mothership, this reboot should have been shot down when it was pitched.
Barring the recent reunion special, Dance Moms had found a comfortable space in the archival history of reality television. It is certainly in the hall of fame—the series rocketed to commercial success after its initial season in 2011, putting Miller, her dancers, and their mothers in the spotlight for years to come. The series was a perfect storm that made for multiple seasons of perfect reality television moments. While the Abby Lee Dance Company Junior Elite Competition team was battling for first place among other dancers, they were also battling for first amongst themselves on the infamous Dance Moms pyramid—where Miller would highlight which dancers were in her good graces and which ones would be the subject of her ire. The pyramid is iconic enough to have stood the test of time (several cycles of TikTok trends), but it is far from the only legacy that the series has left behind. It may have been reality TV gold, but the cruelty at the heart of Dance Moms highlights the heavy cost that came alongside virality and high ratings.
A cursory rewatch of the series will reveal a multitude of incidents, primarily featuring the elementary-aged protagonists being verbally degraded by Miller. Some of it is under the guise of her teaching and critiquing the girls in order to make sure they win, but oftentimes for arbitrary reasons. Girls were regularly placed on the bottom row of the pyramid and then degraded to the point of tears. Ava Michelle (of Tall Girl fame) was notably cut from the ALDC team for being too tall, and an 8-year-old MacKenzie Ziegler was once put there because she wasn’t able to roll out a red carpet gracefully enough, with Miller stating in a confessional that she would “never forgive MacKenzie for what she did.” She was even needlessly harsh outside of the pyramid setting, with one of her rudest comments being about Chloe Lukasiak’s face—one of her eyes looks slightly smaller due to silent sinus syndrome—but, ultimately, the comment was censored and dubbed over in post production to make it seem like all she did was call Chloe “washed up” (which is still a bad thing to say about a 13-year-old girl).
The drama was undoubtedly there between Miller and the moms as well. The physical altercation between Kelly Highland and Miller is the most famous of the many screaming matches on the show. While the girls were never truly malicious to each other in their own right and are still friends to this day despite the well-documented rivalries that were manufactured between them, they still had to see their mothers and their dance teacher tear into each other every week for the sake of entertaining America. Between being harshly critiqued, competing with other studios and within their own team, and seeing their parents try and bite each other’s heads off, Dance Moms was not a very child friendly set on the emotional front.