mira's favorites of 2009

This will be my attempt to narrow things down to only ONE...

Favorite New TV Show: Glee

Favorite Old TV Show: Grey's Anatomy

Favorite TV Episode: The Office, Pam & Jim's wedding

Favorite TV Dance: Top 20 dance, choreographed by Wade Robson (to The Revels's "Comanche.")

Favorite Movie: 500 Days of Summer (keep in mind I only saw like... 6 movies in the theater this year...)

Favorite Song: "I Gotta Feeling," Black Eyed Peas

Favorite CD: Everything, Ingrid Michaelson

Favorite Book: (that I read this year) Water for Elephants

Favorite Videogame: tie -- Rockband 2 (PS3) & New Super Mario Bros (Wii)

So You Think You Can Dance Season 6 Postmortem

And you thought the blog was dead....of course So You Think You Can Dance brings us out of dormancy. Although, I mean, the last two posts here were about SYTYCD too!

First of all, congratulations to Russell! I personally was more a fan of Kathryn/Jakob/Ellenore but I predicted his win and am not at all disappointed. Overall, I thought this season actually had really a lot of great dancing. Sonya did some great stuff, Jason Gilkison was a welcome addition to ballroom, they finally brought Sean Cheesman and Afro Jazz onto the show (from the Canadian version) and Travis Wall is really growing nicely as a choreographer. If nothing else he has totally fantastic taste in music though...I loooooved that he used the Stars song "My Ex-Lover is Dead" and Portishead's "Machine Gun."

The dancers had more personality and I grew to like, or at least appreciate, all of the top 10, even Mollee. Kathryn/Legacy was probably my favorite couple since Katee/Joshua and I think Kathryn's actually my favorite female dancer of all time on the show. This was a huge surprise since Vegas Week cast her as the annoying squeaky crying girl that would probably be kicked off early. But I don't think she had a single bad routine, and I wish we had gotten to see more of her solos. The 2 she did I LOVED, which is odd because usually I think contemporary girls are all kind of the same, but I found her poise and grace to just be really gorgeous. I also really grew to really like Ashleigh, though I still contend that most of her partnership with Jakob involved posing gracefully while Jakob did all the jumps and turns and such.

Oh, and I really liked the "Meet the Top 20" performance show. It was really great seeing everyone in their own styles before beginning the competition. I hope they keep that idea going in future seasons.

But honestly, this season was really kind of a mess. There were just so many weird/bad/disappointing things that happened...
- Mia Michaels quits
- Ryan Kasprzak eliminated in Vegas
- Paula Van Oppen turns down Top 20 spot
- Billy Bell falls ill and drops out (hopefully we'll see him in Season 7 though!)
- Brandon steps in for Billy and promptly gets kicked off. (At least Nigel said he could come back too)
- No rotating judge (I do like Adam Shankman, but I'd like to see Debbie Allen and Lil C once in awhile)
- Noelle injured
- Ashleigh injured
- Russell injured
- No results show and voting for the first 2 weeks because of baseball
- Three tappers make it to the Top 20...and all are voted out by Week 3. So much for the season of the tapper
- Top 6 finale. Performance show was only 1 hour long, had no solos, no girls/guys routines, no rehearsal footage
- So there were only 6 voting weeks, as opposed to the usual 9
- Technical difficulties and taped replays during results finale (though Cat handled it all quite well)
- And last but not least, NOT A SINGLE MENTION OF TOUR! I don't know if they haven't settled the dates yet or if they're afraid the bad ratings means people won't buy tickets or what, but I mean, how are they going to advertise it now? I can't believe they would just cut it out completely, but I guess we'll just have to wait and see? I do follow basically everyone SYTYCD-related on Twitter so it's not like there's any danger I won't hear about it...

So still a great show, but in terms of programing, in general, this fall season experiment was kind of a failure and I hope they put it back in the summer where it belongs...