Ok, so while I may need to turn in my macho card for loving this show as much as I do, I don’t particularly care. The level of performers started at really good in season one, and has continued to increase season after season - and this year’s finale was no exception. The group dance with the past top dancers must have made more than a few choreographers drool with the amount of sheer talent and skill on a single stage.

This show is superior in so many ways to American Idol, it’s hard to say where to start. For one thing AI’s has a very different motivation - they have to pick someone that will by themselves sell records, so they are continually stacking the deck of songs and placement for and against whatever contestants they need to have succeed or fail. Watching the producer’s manipulations on AI is really getting tedious after a while, especially as they get less and less subtle about it. On SYTYCD, it’s a different story, the top 10+ dancers will all be on the tour, there crowd will come have a great time watching them, and the show serves a range of purposes (getting more people interested in dance, exposing new styles of dance, American and now International), and the judges actually give feedback that’s more useful than Randy saying, “you were pitchy”(wtf, Pitchy, can you be any more specific).

Anyway, this year the finalists once again came down to people who you liked whomever won. Dancers, especially the really good ones, have a very different dynamic than solo performers (singers, etc), because they have to work as part of a group, and prima donnas tend to get cast out because they’re pains to work with (though now always), and so here from the top 20 down, you have a group who are very bonded and supportive of each other.

It’s really annoying that this show (like AI) will NEVER come out on DVD due to song royalties, so we’re stuck with having to pull from your favorite Torrent provider, but it’s well worth the download. If you’ve never seen the show, start from the beginning of any particular season, and just enjoy. Watching young dancers from the streets learn modern dance or Latin ballroom, or ballet dancers learn krump is just amazingly cool. Far more so IMHO than watching a country singer sort out how to belt out rock and roll for judges who already determined who they wanted to win two months earlier.