And then they went and introduced a bunch of new choreographers on the very first episode after I posted this. So either my memory is faulty or somebody's actually reading my spew.

The "bored royals" dance was actually a recycled routine that Sean originally did for the Canadian SYTYCD a few years ago, and unsurprisingly it was better the first time.

I didn't hate their jive, but it wasn't a standout to me — it was one of the dances that just faded into the curtains because it wasn't strong enough to be a standout but wasn't memorably bad the way the Nico/Alexis hip hop was either. By the end of the show, I had completely forgotten it and did an "oh, right, that…

The problem with the "immigration" number was the video that made the rounds in the following week, of basically the same dance — same theme, same suitcase, a few too many of the same moves — being done on one of the European versions of SYTYCD two or three years earlier.

Oh, thank GAWD.

"for the first several weeks the dancers are completely at the mercy of
their assigned choreography and their placement in the lineup"

"Also, did Mary claim to have a puppy-dog face?"

That's exactly my problem with the choreography on SYTYCD these days; they rely on the same faces year in and year out, and don't bring in nearly enough new blood to keep things fresh. I might be wrong, I suppose, but I don't recall that I've seen a new choreographer on the show since they stole Stacey Tookey and…

I have to agree with Jabbawonga: the difference between S1 and now is social media. There'd be no suspense in S10, because who got eliminated would explode on Twitter within minutes of the taping.

"Oreo's gothic clown routines seem like poor man's Wade Robson to me."

All-stars don't come in until midseason when the competing dancers have been whittled roughly in half, so it's going to be about another four weeks before anybody can really answer that for you.

It's ironic that after all the complaints last year about having the eliminations at the end of the performance show last year ("judges get another performance to go on, thus having extra information that the voters didn't have last week", etc.), they somehow managed to find the one and only way they could have made…

As someone who went for the binge, I can confirm that these two episodes didn't exactly work the first time, when I didn't have the necessary context to evaluate them as anything but standalone episodes, but do indeed work a lot better on the second viewing.

Yeah, I noticed that too. I'd have to rewatch the episode again to be sure, but if there was any in-universe reason for the sound to be audible it went over my head the first time.

I figured out pretty early on that the guru was ultimately going to be revealed as *someone* who was already involved in the plot in other ways, though I never actually suspected her.

They really did miss a golden opportunity (or obligation) to make *some* kind of Archer in-joke.

House of Cards

I think the only real problem was that Mae Whitman doesn't have that doughy baby-faced everygirl plainness that made her work as Ann Mk. 1 anymore. There's only so much you can do with makeup to hide the fact that she's now a 25 year old hottie.

kitchin, for what it's worth I have actually seen a few critics in other publications use the Japanese R-word.

It is. They announced months ago that it would be.