Review: All the Right Moves

Teddy, Travis, Kyle, Nick

Dance Show is All Talk (and More Talk)
TVFirstLook

Watching Oxygen's new reality show All The Right Moves (9pm) is similar to watching a dancer twist her ankle on stage but soldier on anyway. There are moments of brilliance. But, wow, it's mostly just painful to watch.

Which is too bad because All The Right Moves has a winning premise. Had it been executed well, it sounds like it could have been a great show, particularly for fans of Fox's So You Think You Can Dance and ABC's Dancing With the Stars.

Travis Wall and Nick Lazzarini are past contestants on SYTYCD - Nick won the first season. They are starting a dance company with Teddy Forance from Dancing With the Stars and their buddy Kyle Robinson, a Julliard-trained dancer.

Together, the four guys are starting a company of dancers to be hired out for TV shows, movies, commercials and theater. That should make for a compelling TV show. It makes for a compelling concept.

And there are moments where you do see behind the scenes of shows like SYTYCD that make you go, "Oh, that's interesting" - like, just how well the dancers know each other, and knew each other before they appeared on Dancing and SYTYCD.

But somewhere along the line from compelling TV concept to actual TV show, things went wrong. All The Right Moves has hardly any dancing.

Instead, for reasons that will baffle you, it goes The Hills route with a cinema verite style of reality-drama. Made up drama, like forcing the fourth dancer - Kyle - to audition to be on the show even though he's, um, already on the show. Groan.

Worse, most of The Hills-style stuff centers on Travis, who, if you were caught up in his brilliance as a dancer and choreographer on SYTYCD, crushes just about 100% of his previously endearing personality.

The guy doesn't shut up. And he doesn't shut up talking about himself. On and on and on. There's a brief scene about two-thirds of the way into the show where the four guys dance. It's exciting and thrilling and underscores just how uninteresting the talking is.

To their credit, the All The Right Moves team tries to make Travis' verbal vomit a story line. But, yowks, that's not interesting, either. It just kills what could have been a great dance-reality show.