Dance Moms

  Are you getting melancholy about next week’s season finale, Dance Mom nation? Or has news of a second season warmed your heart? In any case, I’m pretty sure last night’s episode set us up for some of what we’ll see in Season 2. Namely a big pile of Maddie drama. We begin in beautiful Lake Tahoe, site of the much anticipated Nationals, where the girls frolic (i.e. bend themselves in thirds backward)  in the sunshine and fresh mountain air — and Abby Lee is suddenly sporting an on-purpose hairdo and department store make-up in her “confessionals.” Also pearls. We […]

By Lori Acken Follow @ChannelGuideLLA Forgive me for saying it, but God bless Cathy Nesbitt-Stein. For if it were not for her and her rosy-red dreams of revenge-steeped glory, this episode of Dance Moms — “Cathy Brings It On!” — may have become too depressing to watch. In a genuinely depressing depressing sort of way — not in the incredulous, “this cannot possibly be happening” camptacular sort of way of the first nine episodes. In a tense, tired, beaten-down moms, tinderbox Abby, pins-and-needles children, “can anybody possibly leave here saying hooray for anything about Hollywood?” sort of way.

By Lori Acken Follow @ChannelGuideLLA Do I trust this video to still be in this cyber-spot when I wake up in the morning? No. No I do not. But in any case, here’s what we have to look forward to tomorrow night, Dance Mom fans and spectators. Cathy versus Abby and a nice little air-slap/talk-to-the-hand mutation. I’ll be back to blog as usual on Thursday.

Oh you crafty, crafty Lifetime people! You’re finally onto me. You’ve finally figured out that I watch each premiere episode of Dance Moms pen and paper free in order to stay deeply in touch with my own personal moments of elation and revulsion, to track the number of times my husband drapes himself over the back of the sofa, gapemouthed, to watch … and mostly to save my hands for holding a beer and a bowl of ice cream, which just go really well with Dance Moms. Come morning, I return to the online episode to fill in exact quotes, […]

By Lori Acken Follow @ChannelGuideLLA With no advance warning (unless I was still reeling from LaQueefa when it happened) the gang is now — SURPRISE! — on a multi-city tour that begins in Orlando. Well sort of. We’re pretty sure that everybody is physically in the Sunshine State. But, Chloe will not be dancing solo, says Abby Lee, because, while she was happy with last week’s fourth place finish, Christi was not. Christi looks like she’s going to choke. Chloe looks philosophical in an, “Oh well, at least I can just sit on my doopa to lose to Maddie this week” […]

Welcome to the wildly uncomfortable racial-profiling edition of Dance Moms, dance fans. We’ve already done sexually inappropriate and emotionally inappropriate to death, and we did death last week, so heaven knows it’s time for something new to melt our minds. But first the good news. Since the missing kids routine was such a showstopper, today the blackboard pyramid is not a pyramid at all! It’s Maddie at the top (I think she is superglued there), and in a surprise bit  of joie de vivre, Paige, Brooke, Nia AND Chloe all made the second row! On the other hand, poor Vivi-Anne […]

Ok, now I can barely feel my leg for how hard this show is pulling it. (And yet, I watch. And. Yet. I. Watch.) For one, in the first five minutes of this episode, tastefully titled “Dying To Dance,”  Abby Lee referred to her oddly-assembled little group of dancers as “the entire cast.” For two, she’s bumping 8-year-old Maddie into the age 9-11 solo competition category and no one says a thing. Except Christi. Who, if she was really that tweaked, would have tipped off the judges and put a fine, fast end to Chloe’s competition. Unless I’m not understanding this […]

By Lori Acken Follow @ChannelGuideLLA Fresh off of their hooch-ification of Lancaster, PA — in which Abby’s attempt at West Coast jazz/kiddie porn fusion resulted in one male judge taking photos, everyone else taking offense and the dance group taking home nothing but embarrassment — the Dance Moms and Abby Lee are more a-stew than ever. Well, maybe not so much crazy-eyed Kelly, who assessed her 9-year-old daughter in her inappropriate costume and cheerfully warbled, “Showin’ off that sexy little bod!”, thought the shocking “Electricity” dance number was just ginchy, and would happily glue rhinestones on the whole wide world […]