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st_aurafinaI'm going to keep going with this meme, because I want to post more. And because people asked such interesting things!
china_shop asked for my favourite Aussie TV show.
It was hard! There's a lot going on in Aussie TV right now. I was torn between Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries and Dance Academy. I've already written about Miss Fisher, here, though, so I'll pick Dance Academy.
Have a S1 trailer to explain the premise:
The show's about a bunch of ultra-competitive ballet kids in their mid teens, crammed into a high-octane elite ballet school perched on on Sydney Harbour (like, somewhere near Circular Quay, I think? My Sydney memories are hazy.) We follow them through three seasons, and see them graduate and launch into the world as adult, employable dancers. It's very tropey - all the same things I loved in ballet books, I loved in this show: country girl with natural talent, competitive girl learns to find joy in her art, boy from the wrong side of the tracks desperate to show how much he doesn't care about this thing he cares so much about, martinet teacher with a secret heart of gold. It's a three season closed canon show, the first two seasons are 26 episodes and the last one 13, each episode is half an hour.
You'll like this show if you have a competency kink - they do a good job of showing the hard work and the capriciousness of the dance world. You'll like this show if you have a thing for found family, because a lot of the characters are lost, in one way or another, and cling to each other to form a tight family group. You'll like this show if you like scenery porn - it's shot in Sydney, and they spend a lot of time on the beach, or showing you seascapes of the harbour and the bridge and the Opera House. You'll like this show if you're fond of ballet, of course, and especially if you're interested in the behind the scenes part of dance, the classes, rehearsals, costuming and staging.
To explain why I love this show especially for its Aussie character, I need to explain the Australian notion of dagginess. This show is full of dags and daggy behaviour and people who think they're cool but we can see the inner dag. How to explain dags? The literal meaning is much nastier than the social meaning. Dags are so uncool that they're cool. Have you seen Muriel's Wedding? That's a movie about dagdom, and how to be happy with your dagitude. Aussie TV, especially contemporary drama, always seems a bit daggy to me, in comparison to the slick, high production values of US TV. Dance Academy has a lot of dags in it. This is a cool/not cool show. You kind of have to understand that, before you can love the main character, who is the most massive dag of all. I love her, but she's a massive dag.
Tara Webster
Tara is the big fish in a little pond storyline - she's the best dancer in her region, but completely at sea in a class of best dancers. She's sweet and kind, incredibly naive, plunges blithely through some seriously embarrassing encounters. I nearly quit watching early on because I couldn't handle the embarrassment squick. Sometimes she's a bit like doge:
I nearly quit watching, but I didn't, because Tara is also incredibly resilient. I love her unshakeable belief in some universal power that will make things better. I love that the show challenges her on that belief over and over. She's kind, in ways that aren't always helpful in an ultra competitive environment, and she is all about her friends. She gets hurt, a lot. She picks herself up and launches into the next thing just as passionately and fearlessly. But she's a dag. And a country town dag, too. And I love that.
Kat Karamakov
Kat! Kat is from dancing royalty, and is seriously disenchanted with the whole idea of ballet. Her family is super dysfunctional - Kat is this series' poster girl for found family - and she knows and hates that she's at the academy based on her parents' merits and not her own. I adore Kat - this is one tough, guarded person masquerading as a bright, bouncy, sunny girl. She has a complex relationship with the other students, and with herself, and with dancing. It says a lot about her, both positive and negative, that it was hard for me to find images of her on her own.
Abigail Armstrong
Abigail has been on track to be a dancer all her life. She's the child of a stage mother, and she's ferociously focused and incredibly prickly and isolated. In the show, Abigail has just about reached the limits of where good training and dedication will take her without having an ideal dancer's body. This does mean that she scores the inevitable eating disorder storyline, but that is mostly dealt with in S1. Abigail's storyline through the series is fantastic. I stan for Abigail, and I love where she ends up at the end of the series.
Grace Whitney
Okay, Grace doesn't show up until second season so I can't say too much about her, but when she does show up, give her a chance; she's so much more than the evil saboteur storyline they set her up with at first. And also, lookie! Tara Morice plays Miss Raine, her aunt, and teacher at the academy. Yay, Miss Raine!
Miss Raine is awesome! Forever!
Okay, there are also some boys.
Sammy Lieberman
Sammy! Sammy is the heart and soul of this show. He's from a high achieving family, and is only at the academy because his father has the misconception that once Sammy gets this dancing thing out of his system, he'll go and be a doctor as is right and proper. It's nice to see a non-Christian religious family presented as completely normal - Sammy is Jewish, and has to balance classes versus religious observation without seeming too into ballet in front of his dad. And man, is Sammy the glue that holds the other students together, or what? Sammy. Love.
Christian Reed
Christian is all brooding gazes and deeply hidden passions and self-destructive behaviours, and as a result, he's the main love interest in the show, for both male and female characters. I do love he way they write him, because he's got a wry sense of humour and a way of cutting through bullshit when everyone else is faffing around.
Benjamin Tickle, Lucy Raine, Ollie Lloyd
Ben, the self-titled Benster, and Ollie are season 2 characters, so I haven't spent as much time on them. It's hard to talk about their character arcs without substantial spoilers, but I wanted to put their faces up here. And another of Miss Raine, because.
So, that's Dance Academy. Tiny little Australian show full of ballet and growing up. I hope some of you check it out.
china_shop asked for my favourite Aussie TV show.It was hard! There's a lot going on in Aussie TV right now. I was torn between Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries and Dance Academy. I've already written about Miss Fisher, here, though, so I'll pick Dance Academy.
Have a S1 trailer to explain the premise:
The show's about a bunch of ultra-competitive ballet kids in their mid teens, crammed into a high-octane elite ballet school perched on on Sydney Harbour (like, somewhere near Circular Quay, I think? My Sydney memories are hazy.) We follow them through three seasons, and see them graduate and launch into the world as adult, employable dancers. It's very tropey - all the same things I loved in ballet books, I loved in this show: country girl with natural talent, competitive girl learns to find joy in her art, boy from the wrong side of the tracks desperate to show how much he doesn't care about this thing he cares so much about, martinet teacher with a secret heart of gold. It's a three season closed canon show, the first two seasons are 26 episodes and the last one 13, each episode is half an hour.
You'll like this show if you have a competency kink - they do a good job of showing the hard work and the capriciousness of the dance world. You'll like this show if you have a thing for found family, because a lot of the characters are lost, in one way or another, and cling to each other to form a tight family group. You'll like this show if you like scenery porn - it's shot in Sydney, and they spend a lot of time on the beach, or showing you seascapes of the harbour and the bridge and the Opera House. You'll like this show if you're fond of ballet, of course, and especially if you're interested in the behind the scenes part of dance, the classes, rehearsals, costuming and staging.
To explain why I love this show especially for its Aussie character, I need to explain the Australian notion of dagginess. This show is full of dags and daggy behaviour and people who think they're cool but we can see the inner dag. How to explain dags? The literal meaning is much nastier than the social meaning. Dags are so uncool that they're cool. Have you seen Muriel's Wedding? That's a movie about dagdom, and how to be happy with your dagitude. Aussie TV, especially contemporary drama, always seems a bit daggy to me, in comparison to the slick, high production values of US TV. Dance Academy has a lot of dags in it. This is a cool/not cool show. You kind of have to understand that, before you can love the main character, who is the most massive dag of all. I love her, but she's a massive dag.
Tara is the big fish in a little pond storyline - she's the best dancer in her region, but completely at sea in a class of best dancers. She's sweet and kind, incredibly naive, plunges blithely through some seriously embarrassing encounters. I nearly quit watching early on because I couldn't handle the embarrassment squick. Sometimes she's a bit like doge:
I nearly quit watching, but I didn't, because Tara is also incredibly resilient. I love her unshakeable belief in some universal power that will make things better. I love that the show challenges her on that belief over and over. She's kind, in ways that aren't always helpful in an ultra competitive environment, and she is all about her friends. She gets hurt, a lot. She picks herself up and launches into the next thing just as passionately and fearlessly. But she's a dag. And a country town dag, too. And I love that.
Kat! Kat is from dancing royalty, and is seriously disenchanted with the whole idea of ballet. Her family is super dysfunctional - Kat is this series' poster girl for found family - and she knows and hates that she's at the academy based on her parents' merits and not her own. I adore Kat - this is one tough, guarded person masquerading as a bright, bouncy, sunny girl. She has a complex relationship with the other students, and with herself, and with dancing. It says a lot about her, both positive and negative, that it was hard for me to find images of her on her own.
Abigail has been on track to be a dancer all her life. She's the child of a stage mother, and she's ferociously focused and incredibly prickly and isolated. In the show, Abigail has just about reached the limits of where good training and dedication will take her without having an ideal dancer's body. This does mean that she scores the inevitable eating disorder storyline, but that is mostly dealt with in S1. Abigail's storyline through the series is fantastic. I stan for Abigail, and I love where she ends up at the end of the series.
Okay, Grace doesn't show up until second season so I can't say too much about her, but when she does show up, give her a chance; she's so much more than the evil saboteur storyline they set her up with at first. And also, lookie! Tara Morice plays Miss Raine, her aunt, and teacher at the academy. Yay, Miss Raine!
Miss Raine is awesome! Forever!
Okay, there are also some boys.
Sammy! Sammy is the heart and soul of this show. He's from a high achieving family, and is only at the academy because his father has the misconception that once Sammy gets this dancing thing out of his system, he'll go and be a doctor as is right and proper. It's nice to see a non-Christian religious family presented as completely normal - Sammy is Jewish, and has to balance classes versus religious observation without seeming too into ballet in front of his dad. And man, is Sammy the glue that holds the other students together, or what? Sammy. Love.
Christian is all brooding gazes and deeply hidden passions and self-destructive behaviours, and as a result, he's the main love interest in the show, for both male and female characters. I do love he way they write him, because he's got a wry sense of humour and a way of cutting through bullshit when everyone else is faffing around.
Ben, the self-titled Benster, and Ollie are season 2 characters, so I haven't spent as much time on them. It's hard to talk about their character arcs without substantial spoilers, but I wanted to put their faces up here. And another of Miss Raine, because.
So, that's Dance Academy. Tiny little Australian show full of ballet and growing up. I hope some of you check it out.
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Date: 2014-01-01 11:15 pm (UTC)Bunheads is so great! I wish it had made it to another season!
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Date: 2014-01-01 09:54 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2014-01-01 11:17 pm (UTC)It's a fun show to watch, and I really liked having a show with half-hour episodes on my watchlist.
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Date: 2014-01-01 10:57 pm (UTC)I'm not sure what it is (someday I'll pinpoint the reasons), but I really love Australian tv shows, not just the big ones like Xena and Farscape, but the littler ones that don't hit fandom big. So I always appreciate recs. Thank you!
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Date: 2014-01-01 11:26 pm (UTC)The thing that helps a lot with Tara - because she never stops doing these embarrassing things, not until maybe the last couple of episodes in season 3 - is that she's surprisingly unhurt by them. And I think that if someone asked her if she'd do things differently, she'd say "No, the experience was part of what makes me who I am."
And the other reason is the rest of the cast - Kat, Abigail, Sammy, and later, Grace and Ollie. Intense friendships and complex family dynamics in amongst the boyfriend swapping.
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Date: 2014-01-02 12:00 am (UTC)Okay, I'd actually like to see someone be resilient about the embarrassment. I watch Big Bang Theory, which does make me cringe sometimes. So it's not as if I can't get on past these things.
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Date: 2014-01-02 01:52 am (UTC)BTW, I think my favourite Aussie TV show has to be Sea Change, because Laura is SUCH a dag!
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Date: 2014-01-05 01:56 am (UTC)