Review – Dancing With The Stars Australia
Dancing With The Stars Australia – Seven – 6:30pm Sunday – AUS
Channel 7’s reality juggernaut Dancing With The Stars is back for its eleventh series. That’s right, it’s eleventh series. I know; it took me a minute to process that information as well. Most reviews of Dancing With The Stars would include some kind of joke like ‘I see the dancing but where are the stars?’ but I’m going to avoid that this season simply because I recognize at least half the contestants and for a Dancing With The Stars season that’s almost a win. My big gripe with this series isn’t the contestants, or the daffy hosts, or the douchebag judges, it’s the sheer size of the thing. Sunday night’s premiere ran for nearly three hours and that is just absolutely ridiculous.
Reality shows have this tendency to stretch their premiere episodes out for two hours, and in Dancing’s case nearly three. It makes sense on an economical level, because reality is cheap, it rates, advertisers will pay you money, and people will tune in because the shows tease out what it is the viewers want. It doesn’t make sense for any other reason though, because even die-hard Dancing fans have to find the running time absurd. Who honestly has three hours on a Sunday night to just hand over to a reality competition no matter how much frothy fun it is? I didn’t watch Sunday’s nights broadcast, thank god, I decided to catch the thing on Seven’s streaming service PLUS7, which was still two hours long not including the ads.
I’ve seen bits and pieces of Dancing With The Stars over the years but have never sat down to a full episode of the sparkly monstrosity. It always gets my goat when somebody is willing to dismiss something without ever watching it. ‘Oh Two & A Half Men is garbage, MasterChef is lame, Cougar Town is gay, oh I’ve never seen it but I just know it is because I’m always right about these things.’ My theory is: watch it, and at least then you have a reason to make fun of it. However, Dancing With The Stars is just such a colossal show that I failed to make it past the half way point. An hour had passed and only half the contestants had danced. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t go on. Dancing With The Stars had beaten me. I had been defeated by the monster.
You might say that I still have no right to mock this show as I couldn’t even watch the whole thing, but to put things in perspective Sunday night’s episode of Dancing With The Stars nearly ran for the same length of time as the first season of The Office (UK). I think that a solid hour of slightly recognizable people dancing is more than enough for me to secure my opinion of this show.
Daniel McPherson is a game host, and it’s nice that his mum is there to give him support. Oh snap! That’s not his mum, that’s a wax figure of Sonja Kruger. Oh snap! No, she’s a person. Sorry, was that a mean thing to say about her? Well, our Sonja would never say anything as horrible as that about another person, so I’ll take it back. Returning as judges this season are Todd McKenny who’s a wanker, Helen Richey who is old, and Josh Horner is like a blander version of Todd McKenny. The contestants are your usual grab-bag of sportsmen, Home & Away stars, tabloid fixtures, other reality contestants, and Manu.
Dancing With The Stars Australia isn’t so much a television program as it’s a time wasting machine. It doesn’t want to entertain you; it wants you to keep watching so it just drags everything out twice as long as it needs to. For each contestant to dance for about two minutes they get allocated 10 minutes of screen time. They get an introduction video where they don’t know the dance, get frustrated, and then declare that they hope to do better on the day. The introduction is followed by the actual dancing, which is always accompanied by a terrible cover version of a popular tune. Then Daniel McPherson has a chat with the contestants, then the judges make some comments, then we get a replay of the dance so we can send in our vote, then Sonja chats with the contestants, and then the judges give their scores. American Idol doesn’t waste as much time as this show.
My issue isn’t with trashy entertainment; there is a mildly enjoyable way to pass the time hidden somewhere within Dancing With The Stars. My problem is that whatever enjoyment can be had with the show is spread incredibly thin over its bloated running time. I may have given up watching half way through the first episode but that was only because Dancing With The Stars forced me to stop. I’ve seen worse programs than Dancing With The Stars, but I’ve never seen anything this mediocre insist that it should go for the same length of time as Avatar. And this was only the first episode, to watch the whole series you’d have to commit yourself to working week’s worth of television.
Good, Alright, Bad Or Ugly?
Bad
