Pure World of Dance Season 1, Week 8 (Cuts) – Power Rankings

Well, I said last week that I thought the judges were bound to get it wrong at some point – and unfortunately, I think that trend extended into this week, with some strange disparity amongst the judges’ scores, disparity between scores and critiques, and general quality of performance and the responses each routine got.  When things feel as wonky as they did on last night’s show, it does give one pause and makes one wonder what exactly is going on…

…which brings me to my next point: it’s important to remember that, while this is a reality show, it is still very, very produced, and there’s little things that go on behind the scenes that may help “shape” the show in a certain way.  Heidi, Vogue, and I had a pretty enlightening email conversation earlier today about some things we had read in various interviews that made us really question the validity of some of what we had seen on the show – particularly how the editing has been rather poor and left the show feeling a bit disjointed.  Something to keep in mind that I think escapes a lot of viewers: when you’ve got a show that is completely pre-taped like WOD, it’s entirely possible (and it’s entirely legal) for the show to edit portions of footage that do not effect the overall outcome of the competition.  This may mean we only see short snippets of acts that are probably going to get eliminated fairly quickly, anyway, or maybe the judges’ comments get edited together in such a way that they appear to be more positive or negative in tone than the complete critique they gave an act. It may even be that they may cut to a judge making a facial expression during a dance, and that particular clip is from another performance altogether, but contextually fits with the “story” of this particular dance better (this sneaky clip poaching is a technique oft-employed on Rupaul’s Drag Race, where several queens have claimed that critiques from the judges have often been shuffled around to make it seem like they’re talking to one queen, when they’re really talking to another). As I’ve said many a time over at PureDWTS – you guys should watch UNReal.  Very eye-opening about the world of reality television and how it’s often not all that…real.

But I digress.  What does all that have to do with the price of tea in China? I think the reason that last night’s show maybe felt so strange and incongruous was some editing – albeit poor editing.  Some of the acts got fairly positive critiques, but only lukewarm scores; other acts seemed to get nitpicked quite a bit more, but ended up with fairly decent scores in the end. And some cuts from the judges to the contestants and back seemed kind of jerky and abrupt, as if whole sections of dialogue had been cut.  I’m hoping that, with hopefully a live format and a longer time slot next season, a lot of these awkward bits of editing disappear. And as for the scoring disparities – I find myself wondering if this might be one of the caveats of the judges scoring on multiple metrics, and not seeing how their fellow judges are scoring.  The only analogy I could come up with takes me back to my sorority days, during formal recruitment.  There were multiple rounds, and each potential candidate was interviewed by a different sister during each round, and then we’d score each candidate and come up with an average that helped to determine if the candidate was going to be offered a bid. Each year, there always seemed to be a candidate that was either rude/distant/uninterested/generally unpleasant that somehow managed to score high enough to get into bid territory, despite all of the sisters who interviewed her being generally unimpressed. We figured out that, because we were scoring independently, most of us tended to pad our scores a bit, just so we didn’t seem douche-y, figuring that the girl wouldn’t make it through, anyway. And when we all did it – it actually had unexpected side effects.  Part of me wonders if something similar is happening with the judges scores – the fact that they aren’t colluding is leading to unexpected disparities, since they can’t really bounce ideas off one another.  Or I’m just trying to make sense of nonsense 😛 Read more..