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Dance Academy!
Aug. 31st, 2012 07:24 pmThis Australian teen soap (spoilers: it's set at a dance school!) is SO MUCH BETTER than it has any right to be! It starts out all, "Oh, the main character is kind of wide-eyed and innocent and the buttmonkey of the world, and there's a rebel and a mean girl and a non-threatening boy and one character of colour from the wrong side of the tracks with a criminal past!"
And now I have one episode of the first season left, and it's all, "The non-threatening boy is freaked out by having a crush on the boy from the wrong side of the tracks, and what if this means he's gay, and what if he loses his best friend, and they have to work it out together, and meanwhile the three main female characters have their own separate storylines about self-determination and obligations to family and self!"
Seriously, I kind of want to smush the show up into a great big hug. Not least because, without ever being preachy or didactic, it portrays really positive behaviour modelling. For example, when the mean girl comes back from her inevitable brush with an eating disorder, her dance partner (and love interest, because he also likes girls), the non-threatening boy, feels responsible for not saaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaving her, and is over-compensating by being the food police. And finally she says, "Stop that. It's not helping. And you can't take responsibility for my choice to starve myself." AND THEN HE TOTALLY RESPECTS HER BOUNDARY! WITHOUT BEING GUILT-TRIP GUY! IT SHOULDN'T BE THIS EXCITING, BUT IT IS.
And meanwhile, wide-eyed new girl protagonist manages to kiss all the boys, and struggles with maintaining her integrity and finally stops making a fool of herself (although no one forgets those times she did).
And the storylines about helping underprivileged kids THROUGH DANCE ... well, they improved.
Oh, show, you are kind of OTT and I side-eye your depiction of Sydney's geography, and also the last time I looked at Sydney Harbour it was full of jellyfish so I'm not convinced by the scenes of joyous youth throwing themselves into that particular body of water, and if I drank every time there was a loving shot of the Sydney Harbour Bridge I'd be dead by now. And also I've developed a Pavlovian response (*snerk*) to your love theme, on account of how you used it for every pairing, plus some rehearsal scenes. But you're actually pretty great.
And now I have one episode of the first season left, and it's all, "The non-threatening boy is freaked out by having a crush on the boy from the wrong side of the tracks, and what if this means he's gay, and what if he loses his best friend, and they have to work it out together, and meanwhile the three main female characters have their own separate storylines about self-determination and obligations to family and self!"
Seriously, I kind of want to smush the show up into a great big hug. Not least because, without ever being preachy or didactic, it portrays really positive behaviour modelling. For example, when the mean girl comes back from her inevitable brush with an eating disorder, her dance partner (and love interest, because he also likes girls), the non-threatening boy, feels responsible for not saaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaving her, and is over-compensating by being the food police. And finally she says, "Stop that. It's not helping. And you can't take responsibility for my choice to starve myself." AND THEN HE TOTALLY RESPECTS HER BOUNDARY! WITHOUT BEING GUILT-TRIP GUY! IT SHOULDN'T BE THIS EXCITING, BUT IT IS.
And meanwhile, wide-eyed new girl protagonist manages to kiss all the boys, and struggles with maintaining her integrity and finally stops making a fool of herself (although no one forgets those times she did).
And the storylines about helping underprivileged kids THROUGH DANCE ... well, they improved.
Oh, show, you are kind of OTT and I side-eye your depiction of Sydney's geography, and also the last time I looked at Sydney Harbour it was full of jellyfish so I'm not convinced by the scenes of joyous youth throwing themselves into that particular body of water, and if I drank every time there was a loving shot of the Sydney Harbour Bridge I'd be dead by now. And also I've developed a Pavlovian response (*snerk*) to your love theme, on account of how you used it for every pairing, plus some rehearsal scenes. But you're actually pretty great.
