If there's one thing we can say about summer TV, it's that there's an obscene dearth of reality dance competitions featuring people who are not professional dancers. While other series such as
So You Think You Can Dance and
America's Best Dance Crew force you to watch talented people who have studied dance for years, where's the show featuring the normal people who just like to break out the "Macarena" at a family party?
Thankfully ABC is here to fill this void, since many TV viewers were clamoring to watch their grandmothers shimmy and shake while doing the "Boot Scootin' Boogie." The newest in the long line of competitive reality dance competitions is
Dance Machine, which will premiere tonight on ABC and give us all the dancing average joes that we can handle.
Your Take
TheEditor said:
What! The Hell! Was That?!?!?!? It's almost worth watching just to see how truly, spectacularly awful an...
BuddyD said:
I've been wondering when a new dance show would finally premiere on television. I always go through the cha...
The series' central concept is to take ordinary, everyday people who are deceptively good dancers and allow them to drop it like it's hot on national television. Each episode will include six real people from all sorts of different backgrounds having themselves a mother effin' dance off to popular songs. As ABC's web site puts it:
“Imagine a 70-year-old grandmother in a dance-off with a 25-year-old gravedigger to the tune of Michael Jackson's ‘Thriller.'”
I have imagined it, ABC, and now I hope said grandmother trowels zombie makeup on her face and gets the whole audience dancing along like it's the big dance number in
13 Going On 30. Though the gravedigger might have a leg up in this case, what with spending his days around dead people and all.
The studio audience will vote after each dance-off and eliminate the contestants one by one until only two dancers are left. The last two standing will need to dance for their lives to – no wait, that's another dance show. Rather, the last two standing will need to jitterbug and jive to win the affections of the studio audience, earn the title of “Dance Machine,” and be awarded $100,000 in cold, hard cash.
If you need a break from the technique and skill of other dance reality shows,
Dance Machine might be the dance competition that you've been waiting for. Be there tonight at 8pm when the new series premieres on ABC.
Call it now -- who will win the 'Thriller' dance-off?
- , BuddyTV Staff Writer
(Photo courtesy of ABC)