GOTTA DANCE!

Okay, time to make a confession.

Remember this summer, when I wrote a long post about how reality television was awful, and it was killing scripted programming and no one should never, ever watch one ever?

I've been forced to make an exception.

Dance Moms on Lifetime.

I watch Dance Moms. (Though not on Lifetime. On my computer. When I have time.)

Here's the thing. My brother was a competitive ice dancer in the 1990s, my eight year old son currently takes ballet (my 12 year old calls to me as I leave the house to take his brother to lessons, "Have fun being a dance mom!"), and, most importantly, I covered figure skating for ABC, ESPN, TNT and NBC for a good chunk of my in-between soap years, then wrote five murder mysteries about it.

I so get the whole Dance Moms... thing.

And I justify watching by pointing out that it's not really a reality show. There is nothing real about it (it's obvious if you've even so much as ever brushed up against that world). What Dance Moms is, in fact, is an improv show, where the situations are staged and phony, and the "actors" (i.e. the titular moms) are really, really bad at improvisation. Which somehow makes it good.

So... that makes it okay? Right?