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.
After the boost in popularity, the girls became child stars in their own right, but lacked the protections that traditional child actors claim. Reality stars of any age are not inherently covered by SAG-AFTRA in the same way that actors in scripted media are, and that lack of protection fails children who star in reality television the most. They do not have the legal right to a Coogan Account—where at least 15% of any earnings are set aside for them until they are adults—and they do not have standardized minimum wages either. Christi Lukasiak has stated that she and Chloe were paid $600 for the entire first season of Dance Moms, and while many of the child stars have gone on to be successful influencers, that is yet another area where children are not legally protected.
Despite the fight to protect child influencers online, they too suffer from the lack of protections that child reality stars do. Not only are they regularly exploited by their parents and not given any agency over what their family posts about them, they are also victims of online child predators, even if they are not directly communicating with them. This is made worse when children are sexualized, whether or not that content airs on TV. Multiple episodes of Dance Moms were put under fire for having overly sexual dances performed by the young cast, and one was completely removed due to a costume implying that the dancers were topless showgirls. Times have changed and the new series has (hopefully) evolved with the world and will avoid similar likely not coincidental blunders, but the fact of the matter is that children who have their real lives put on camera for the whole world to see are subject to a myriad of dangers—whether it be at the hands of an iPhone-wielding parent or a Lifetime film crew. Being on camera with your mother as she fights with your friend’s mother, and then being beholden to the internet in all the years that follow as the footage makes the rounds over and over again, is a perfect storm for psychological distress, especially for young girls in their formative years.
Dance Moms: A New Era will not be the hit that its namesake was. As horrible as Abby Lee Miller was to the ALDC girls, she made for great television alongside the cast of mothers and daughters. Instead of looking at the original series as an example of something that should never be attempted again, Hulu’s A New Era will try to recreate the success of Lifetime’s legendary series with a season half as long, a teacher less as vicious, and an audience of adults that watched Dance Moms when they were close in age to its original protagonists and have grown up knowing how horrible a child reality star’s situation can be. The things that made Dance Moms successful are its worst parts, and there is no need to replicate a situation that will do nothing but hurt the children it puts in the spotlight.
Kathryn Porter is a freelance writer who will talk endlessly about anything entertainment given the chance. You can find her @kaechops on Twitter.
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