The Good:
* It's about an arts school. Art schools are an endangered species, and deserve to be showcased and protected.
* The school' offering is varied and includes not only performing arts, but also plastic arts, in my opinion, THE most endangered of artistic expressions within the context of modern Western education.
* The director is black.
* For the most part, teachers are written as skilled, knowledgeable educators, capable of achieving that rare balance between nurture and challenge.
* The dancers ARE dancers.
* Dramatic situations are engaging - you want to know what happens next (even when they are ludicrous - more on that later).
* The reality show-type "confessionals" are a very clever and effective way of doing introspection.
* Most kids in the show are capable actors and have decent range.
The bad:
* Character development is very slow, and sometimes seems to go all over the place. Granted: these are teenagers, but sometimes I get the feeling that the characters serve the plot and not the other way around.
* This is not Disney or Nick, so the resources to hunt down and sift through the best talent money can find isn't there. The show wants to tell the story of "amazing young singers", but you won't get a Dove Cameron, a Sofia Carson, a Leon Thomas, let alone an Ariana Grande, a China Anne McClain or a Demi Lovato. You'll get kids who are decent singers that still have a ways to go. I guess that should be good enough, since it's more realistic. However, as a musician, I am left wanting.
* Only singers and dancers get the spotlight. The only musician who does not sing is a DJ, not an instrumentalist. Similarly, the only painter the show manages to focus on, turns out to be a dancer, apparently just to fit the tropes of the show. Segue shots are full of kids carrying tubas, playing bongos, twirling drumsticks, practicing saxophone, but the scenes are never about them. Again, as a musician, I find this irritating.
The Ugly:
* Kids' relationships are fragile and volatile. Heck, they're even violent sometimes! But THIS level of betrayal? ALL the time? All of these secrets, manipulations, and right out lies? It's ludicrous! It would appear that writers look for ways of creating rifts between the characters just to fuel the drama.
* I'd like to see themes like race, gender, equality, even the relevance of the arts as a trade get treated. Nope. All issues are dealt with here are pretty much intrigue and drama fueled by huge hormone-driven egos. It's almost like if Shonda Rimes had written High School Musical.
* Serious discipline faults are seldom really dealt with in a convincing. Only one incident of import was really dealt with by the faculty, BUT with NO intervention from the parents whatsoever! I don't know how things are handled in Canada, but here in PR some of these situations would have incurred at least a suspension and you can rest assured the principal would have called parents to their workplace and expect them to drop everything at once for a closed door meeting at the school within the day.
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