On Dance Moms and Reclaiming the Narrative

What happens when reality stars outlive their TV show? It doesn’t happen often. While monoliths like Big Brother and American Idol occasionally produce breakout celebrities, the name of the franchise tends to remain bigger than any one contestant on a reality show. Dance Moms wasn’t as popular or as long-lived, but in the seven seasons that aired, it helped propel its featured child stars into mainstream success.Dance Moms began on Lifetime in 2011, following in the footsteps of shows like Toddlers and Tiaras that put stage parents on display. The production team was full of heavy hitters like Sandi Johnson and Michael Hammond, known for producing reality TV staples like Hell’s Kitchen, The Amazing Race, Undercover Boss, and The Bachelor.When the show started, the plot was heavily orchestrated by the producers. The narrative moved along scripted story lines, focusing mainly on tensions between the mothers and Abby Lee Miller, a notoriously demanding dance teacher with bumper-ready sound bites like “save your tears for your pillow.” The dancers themselves, most between the ages of six and nine, acted largely as a source of B-roll footage. The girls danced while the Moms argued over solo assignments and costume choices, then performed their numbers in a competition at the end of each episode. These competitions were semi-staged, technically open but with relatively few entries. The girls also performed their routines twice for the cameras, though competitions like Sheer Talent insist that only the first performance was judged.Lifetime’s audience is mainly women between 25 and 54, but Dance Moms appealed to a younger demographic. In season one it drew Lifetime’s youngest ever audience, with the average viewer aging 37.When I started watching at 20, I was essentially off Lifetime’s radar. It was the summer before my third year of university and I was living by myself in the student house I normally shared with five other people. I was spending a lot of time watching TV, and Dance Moms appealed to me because it was familiar. I grew up taking dance and gymnastics lessons, and spent a few years teaching both to kids around the same age as the cast. In the first few seasons especially, the girls are profoundly normal. They are very talented, but they’re still just kids. Possibly because the mothers were the intended focus of the show, the producers didn’t originally script drama between the girls. Their relationships with each other are positive and earnest. They seem like they really love dancing. It might not have been what the producers intended, but it hooked viewers like me—and viewers younger than me.As the popularity of the show grew among viewers under 18, the dancers themselves began to amass immense followings on social media. Young fans started to attend tapings of competitions; in the later seasons, the dancers cut through throngs of cheering girls on their way to perform in high school auditoriums and community theatres.

Dedicated users, with subscriber counts in the hundreds of thousands, use these clips for more than just fan compilations. They are actively adding to the narrative of the show ...

The producers took notice, and began to shift their focus to the girls as well. They started to stoke rivalries between the top dancers, placing them head to head in competition for lucrative prizes like music video roles and ballet academy scholarships. They also began to develop easily digestible personas for the dancers, complete with descriptive traits to be repeated over and over again: Nia is the underdog, Kendall is the drama queen, Maddie’s the perfectionist. “You know, I’m Maddie Ziegler and I’m a perfectionist,” she says dully in season 5.In 2015, Amy McCarthy of Jezebel profiled the young fan base of Dance Moms, diving headfirst into the (admittedly intense) Instagram niche. While the Jezebel article focused on the “gloriously unhinged” nature of the fans, what is perhaps more striking (and worth talking about) is that the pre-teens of the new fanbase are incredibly media savvy. They have created an elaborate infrastructure for capturing and anthologizing everything the dancers share. A YouTube search of “Dance Moms snapchat” returns saved and dated versions of pictures and livestreams that are designed by the app to be deleted after viewing. Dedicated users, with subscriber counts in the hundreds of thousands, use these clips for more than just fan compilations. They are actively adding to the narrative of the show, posting videos with titles like “Brynn and Camryn drama EXPLAINED” and “Maddie addresses rumours—IS SHE CHEATING ON JACK???” These dancers are their celebrities, and so they became their own E! Hollywood News team. Like Potterheads and their fanfiction, these viewers found a way to engage with the world they loved between seasons.In increasing numbers, these young fans are also catching onto the way reality shows are produced. Alongside the fan videos are compilations like “FAKE SCENES ON DANCE MOMS” and “Why dance moms is a sham.” These videos slow down and analyze changes in audio to show when fights appear to be edited. They zoom in on mirror reflections to prove that some shots have been stitched together out of sequence. They contrast clips of the show with videos that fans have taken on their phones at live tapings, revealing where the producers have manipulated the audio to make it seem like a dancer’s music skipped on stage.

The stars are never meant to get so big that they eclipse the show itself.

Initially, the Dance Moms producers tried to recoup their young fan base by integrating social media with the show’s scripted drama. They started devoting screen time to recapping fights that happened online, with the Moms reading tweets to each other as though they had simply stumbled across them. In season seven, Brynn (a relatively new addition to the team) faced backlash on social media for liking a tweet insulting the other dancers. This became one of the main points of action for the next three episodes, even though most of the drama took place off-screen. It was, arguably, a step in the right direction, but by the time the show aired the Twitter feud had cooled, and devoted fans had moved on.In another capitulation to the powers of social media, the producers brought back a fan favourite: dancer Chloe Lukasiak. After leaving the show in season four, Chloe returned in season seven, presumably due to the success of her YouTube channel. With the following she gained on the show and cultivated through YouTube and Instagram, Chloe used her off-seasons to secure movie roles and advertising deals. In 2015, a year after she’d left the show, she and Maddie Ziegler were both nominated for Choice Dancer at the Teen Choice awards. Chloe won. By the time she returned to Dance Moms, she had 1.4 million subscribers on YouTube and 5.8 million followers on Instagram. And Chloe is far from the only influencer on the show: Maddie has 10.6 million followers on Instagram and her sister Mackenzie has 9 million. Kendall Vertes has 6 million, and was recently voted “best selfie game” in Tiger Beat’s 19 Under 19 issue.The dancers, for their part, have responded to fame by rapidly evolving into media professionals. They understand the optics of the show, and are reluctant to do anything on camera that could provoke backlash. In seasons 1 and 2, one of the main points of action was the fight for solo performances. Solos were coveted, fought over, and taken away only as extreme punishment. By the final episodes, though, the star dancers on the team began to turn down solos when they felt they didn’t have enough time to perfect them. Learning choreography on a tight timeline had been a staple of the show from the beginning, but by season seven the girls had grown wary of criticism. Cheryl Burke, a guest choreographer, addressed this directly in episode 25: “I see these girls as very insecure. I think the whole social media circus surrounding this team and Abby … it’s a lot. They’re not focused on dance.” Maybe not, but they are focused on their careers. And at that point in the show, none of the dancers were willing to risk their reputation on a last-minute piece that might be torched in the YouTube comment section.Maddie Ziegler became the show’s breakout star when she starred in Sia’s “Chandelier” music video. Since the video went viral, Maddie has performed with Sia on Saturday Night Live and Ellen, starred in a movie with Naomi Watts, started her own clothing line and written two books. Several of the dancers launched music careers on the show, including Kendall Vertes, Nia Frazier, Jojo Siwa and Mackenzie Ziegler (who is currently touring Europe to promote her new album). Together, these young dancers-cum-moguls have created branded lines of socks, phone cases and personalized emojis. Through their Instagrams, they promote hair care products, tooth whitening systems, apps, games, books, robotic pets and mattresses.

If the success of a reality show depends on the ability of the production team to manipulate both its talent and its fan base, then Dance Moms failed in part due to its success.

By the time Dance Moms aired its final episodes on October 24, 2017, many fans were no longer watching. From its peak in season two (2.51 million US viewers), viewership declined to a paltry 0.31 million for the final episode. I still watched the last season, more for a sense of completion than anything else. I definitely didn’t tune in live. Like most fans, I was getting tired of seeing the same production gambits over and over again. Also, like most fans, I follow the girls on Instagram, where they regularly upload videos of their latest projects. The dance content is indisputably better: free from the legal trappings of network television, the girls are able to work with different choreographers, collaborate with other artists, and dance to a wider range of music.You could consider Dance Moms a success in that it made its stars famous in the mainstream. But that’s never really the point of a reality show, is it? The reality shows that have stayed on the air the longest—cultural touchstones like Big Brother and The Bachelor—rely on a revolving door of aspiring celebrities that will be forgotten shortly after their episodes air, brought back into relevance only during All Star seasons. The stars are never meant to get so big that they eclipse the show itself.And yet today, more people have seen Maddie Ziegler dance on Saturday Night Live than they have on Dance Moms: the video of just one of her performances with Sia on SNL has over 18 million views on YouTube. If the success of a reality show depends on the ability of the production team to manipulate both its talent and its fan base, then Dance Moms failed in part due to its success. The show helped the dancers cultivate a social media following that gave the stars direct access to their fans. Social media in turn allowed fans to organize, pool their knowledge, and criticize the production of the show while still supporting the girls that made it worth watching in the first place.Maybe their fame won’t last. The show only ended recently and the girls have a lot stacked against them. They are still saddled with mothers who agreed to let them grow up on television. They are still coming of age in a world that is not particularly kind to young women, and they are still doing it with millions of people watching. But from the beginning, the girls of Dance Moms have been thriving against all odds. As third graders, they entered an industry that profits by exploiting youth and inexperience. They took a show that was never supposed to be about them and became the stars. In outlasting their own show, they accomplished something that few reality stars ever do: they took back the narrative.

Amy Oldfield was born in Ottawa and lives in Toronto. You can read more of her work in Bad Nudes, The Puritan, and This Magazine.