I started watching this show, "So You Think You Can Dance" partly due to the influence of some friends of mine who were really, really into it. I think it's been on for a few years now but I'd never really seen it before this season, and I had nothing more pressing to put into the Tivo so I gave it a try. Tivo is pretty much worthless from about April to October, except maybe for people who have HBO or some of the better channels. All the regular shows are on hiatus, and most of them are crap anyway, except for 30 Rock, House and mayyyyybe LOST. LOST is on thin ice with me. They redeemed themselves somewhat by hiring a wonderful and talented actor who I went to college with for the last seven episodes of the last season, but. I can only take so much messing with my mind from network television; my tolerance for high end cable channels is a little higher but only because there are no commercials. They need to start revealing some big pieces of the plot, stop introducing new characters, and start having Sawyer take his shirt off more if they want to keep me as a viewer. I have spoken.
Anyway, SYTYCD is a good show and I was keeping up with it for a while. It's similar to American Idol but in my opinion, far far less nauseating. For one thing, the judges actually seem to know what they're talking about and they don't seem to delight in utterly humiliating the contestants at each and every opportunity. For another, the ability to win the show seems predicated on the ability to actually dance. American Idol doesn't always seem to care if you can sing or not, which is evidenced by the fact that a lot of people keep staying on it who can't really sing. Naturally if they can't, they have to have a nice rack or butt or be reallllly charming. To me, dancing and singing are both highly technical things (that I can't really do) - but they're technical in that you can either do them or you can't. You can hit the note or follow the choreography - or not. There are certain subjective things like personal style but for the most part it's pretty cut and dried. And the dancers they get on the show are really good and they all have to try these different genres such as ballroom and hiphop so you see them really working outside their normal comfort zone.
Of course, it has to have the usual reality tv-slash-artistic competition gameshow issues which hold it back. Like the woo-ing. There is a disproportionate amount of woo-ing (that is, teenagers screaming "WOOOOOO!") on these shows and it's very obnoxious and they need to get Judge Judy or somebody with a gavel to sit up there and mitigate that because it bugs. One of their judges is also disproportionately fond of woo-ing, which she does at increasingly high decibels and with mounting obnoxion, and that bugs, but it's also sort of cute because at least she reserves it for the times when they really do something awesome.
The other issue is the frequency of the program. They have the show on Wednesday, I think, and then again on Thursday. So the contestants dance their pieces and then America(tm) calls in to vote (I don't do this and I consider calling in on your cell phone to vote on the merit of someone's artistic expression to be horrifying and tacky, not to mention that it's undoubtedly cooked up by the cell phone companies as a way to boost revenue - ew), and then on Thursday you're supposed to tune back in and watch people get eliminated. Now that's FOUR hours of the show in a given week, not including commercial time. Four hours a week! I don't devote four hours a week to personal hygiene! Four hours a week is too much. So for the most part, I don't really watch the episodes that air on Thursdays. If I really really really have nothing else at all going on, I might fast-foward to the end of the Thursday episode to see who gets kicked off, but more often than not I'll just wait till the following week and see who dropped off the opening of the show. And since I don't really devote a lot of hard-core energy to thinking about these things, half the time I can't really figure it out from that but then when the show's over I'll realize I never saw, say, the little Japanese girl so she must have gotten kicked off. Simple. Except now there are like six episodes sitting on the Tivo that I haven't gotten around to, and thanks to the internet, I already know who won. So do I invest the time and effort to actually plod through those six episides so I can see how it all shakes out? It's supposed to be about watching the dancers, of course, but in the course of viewing TWELVE HOURS of the show there's bound to be a great deal of fast-forwarding, which isn't really in keeping with the spirit of, you know, the arts. Am I supposed to watch the judges' discussion so I can see whether or not I agree with the outcome now that I know who won?
It's too much pressure for me. This is what happens when you combine the power of technology with a sensitive artistic sensibility like mine. I'm just going to watch Roseanne reruns and local news from now on.