But anyway, Episode Three of SYTYCD features the top 50 competitors in Hollywood. In case your forgot, Lauren Sanchez reminds us, it's the Entertainment Capital of THE WORLD! You don't even need talent to make it, ask Lauren Sanchez! The magic number is five this week. The contestants were broken down into five groups, and over five days, they were going to strut their stuff for five different choreographers - ballroom, salsa, contemporary and two kinds of hip hop (looked sort of the same to me). Just to assure us these choreographers were the best, they dropped celebrity names left and right - Britney, Hillary Duff, Gloria Estefan, Madonna, Jessica Simpson, Ricky Martin, N'Sync, and the real icing on the cake - Ted Danson. I wasn't aware that Ted Danson was so skilled, maybe he was learning dance to impress Whoopi.

The first hip hop choreographer is surprisingly, a gay Jew – Brian Friedman. At one point during the show Brian is wearing a cap with the words "Be Free" on it. Brilliant! Name pun on the t-shirt! Get it, Be, as in Brian, and Free, Friedman. That's how they came up with B-side, his real name is Bob Sideways. We have Mia, the contemporary choreographer, who is sporting an ass the size of Cleveland, or Drew Carey, it's a tossup. Next, there's a ballroom dance choreographer who spends her first minutes with the class telling them to wash their hands - and their teeth if they forgot to that morning. She clearly has high expectations for the group. She also doesn’t like anyone to look like anything other than Fred Astaire on the dance floor, which means th guy with a Mohawk spends lunch hour in the bathroom combing his hair like Beaver Cleaver to please her.

We can't forget Alex, the salsa dancer, who at about five feet four, 100 lbs., clearly has a huge Napoleon complex. They show him each day arriving at the auditions in a different flashy motorcycle or car, which we all know is to hide what has to be a microscopic penis. Finally, there is Dan, another white guy hip hop choreographer. Dan quickly becomes my favorite. He has an overall nice demeanor, is nice to the students, but then skewers them to their back behind the camera. Go Dan! This guy knows how to work in Hollywood.

Now the great thing about this episode is that while we have spent a lot of time to get rid of the freaks and clowns who just showed up at the auditions for their 15 seconds of fame, and had never had a dance lesson in their life, we narrowed the field to 50 but still have some marginal dancers. But the best part? The worse they dance, the better they think they are. The two worst girls in Dan’s class, Jessica and Burgandy, two days in a row, fake injuries when they can’t get the choreography. But Dan’s totally onto them, and so is everyone else when they miraculously recover in time for an unsolicited freestyle performance. Burgandy also does a frightening self-motivating speech, where she does a fine imitation of Jack Nicholson in the Shining, and I'm sure she'll be happy to know how much we all think she is an idiot. Jessica too, goes on and on about her brilliance. Bring it on!

Blake comes across as the “frontrunner,” who the rest of the contestants are jealous of/mad at because he’s a professional dancer. This is kind of ironic, since half of the dancers in the competition admit to being professional dancers. But in Blake’s case, he’s actually a working professional dancer. Dan does his best to bring Blake down a notch, telling him to basically lose the ‘tude. So far that’s not working. I love when he did his contemporary dance scene and starts bawling during his routine. Instead of the rest of the class busting a gut laughing, like I’m doing on my couch, they also start crying. One of the contestants picks up a dance magazine during lunch to find an article about Blake (who apparently was on tour with Britney Spears – too bad Blake’s gay, because if he played his cards right, he could be living in Malibu instead of K-Fed) and he goes on about how he doesn’t understand why Blake is there. What I don’t understand is why more working professional dancers didn’t audition for this show. First of all, $100,000 is nothing to sneeze at, and you can’t beat the exposure of 12 weeks dancing your stuff on the Fox network. Was it that hard to come up with 50 dancers who could actually dance?

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Posted by on August 6, 2005 2:07 PM