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Of all the great things about television, the greatest is that it’s on every single day. TV history is being made, day in and day out, in ways big and small. In an effort to better appreciate this history, we’re taking a look back, every day, at one particular TV milestone.
IMPORTANT DATE IN TV HISTORY: April 24, 2012
PROGRAM ORIGINALLY AIRED ON THIS DATE: Dancing with the Stars, “Top 8 Results” (Season 14, Episode 11)
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT: Taken on its own merits, the group routine performed by choreographer/dancer Travis Wall and his Shaping Sound troupe on the 4/24/12 episode of Dancing with the Stars was a particularly gorgeous, well-performed piece of contemporary dance.
Devoid of any context, it’s still some of the best dancing that’s ever appeared on TV, whether on Dancing with the Stars or anywhere else. But there are deeper, more meaningful levels to this particular piece of television, which end up elevating it to something more than just a great piece of dancing in the middle of a fairly nondescript season of Dancing with the Stars. Those levels speak to the ways in which television is a unique and ultimately personal medium, with multiple arcs and pathways crossing over onto each other to create any number of different viewing experiences.
To take this performance as but one example:
- Travis Wall is an incredibly talented dancer and choreographer who first came to television on season 2 of So You Think You Can Dance, finishing in second place and subsequently returning as one of the show’s most beloved choreographers.
- The lead performer of this routine — the girl who gets to fly all around the stage — is Jaimie Goodwin, who made the top 10 of SYTYCD in season 3. Jaimie’s story was that she was Travis’s best friend from childhood.
- Travis, Jaimie, and the members of the Shaping Sound crew were featured on the Oxygen reality series All the Right Moves. At some point on the series, Travis talked about how meaningful it was to choreograph something for Jaimie, who was not only his friend but his former girlfriend during his closet-y teen years. Watching the Dancing with the Stars performance with that backstory, you can read a lot more narrative into the movement of the piece (he there on the ground as she takes off soaring into the air).
- The history of Dancing with the Stars also plays into this. The show began as a summer series that embraced the squareness of its concept. Ballroom dancing with C-list celebrities wasn’t in any way cool. But as the show went on, the show began to find its footing (so to speak) in the ecosystem of TV dance shows (which by this point had become a legitimate subgenre). By 2012, the show has begun regular supplementing their ballroom celebs with exhibitions from various dance professionals. No longer merely a side show, DWTS had become a legitimate destination to watch world-class dancing.
So, again, watch this routine in a vacuum, you get one (very rewarding) experience. But TV shows don’t exist in a vacuum. Every other show you watch gives you a piece of context. Follow enough of it, and TV becomes a great interconnected soap opera. The lesson, as always: watch more TV.
