By: Tabby Hardman

It’s 3:30 a.m. and I was writing a dreadful English paper in the pits of darkness with nothing but a faulty lamp illuminating my corner of the room.

The television flickered to the next program and funky music started to play, I look up and realized “Dance Mom’s Miami” is on.

I pushed aside my laptop and told my roommate, “Oh my God, I have to watch this.”

I was so excited. I was expecting it to be amazing. The commercials made it look so much better than the original Pittsburgh Dance Moms.

But, it wasn’t. Abby Lee Miller still rules.

Last Tuesday, “Dance Mom’s Miami” premiered at 9 p.m. on “Lifetime” and was nothing but a satirical version of the original “Dance Mom’s” run by the mom-hating choreographer, Abby Lee Miller.

As a self-proclaimed “Dance Mom’s” fanatic, I was expecting a slightly more emotional and glittery version of the original, but nevertheless not too dissimilar.  I was mistaken.

The point of the show is to highlight women living vicariously through their marginal children who have yet to experience the trials and tribulations of puberty which, with time, becomes a game of survival of the fittest and less about ‘my mommy said’—but the show couldn’t have been further from that.

The focus of this week’s episode was around, Victor Smalley, one of the two coaches and part-owner of the Miami, Fla. based dance studio, Stars.

Smalley paraded around the show like a precocious drama king playing to the camera after falling ill with a stomach virus and talking to the parents as though they were children without a brain.

Not to mention his side-kick co-owner, Angel Armas, who proclaimed to the parents their children wouldn’t make the “List” (order of best dancer to worst dancer of the week — kinda like Abby Lee’s pyramid — do dance school’s across the country really rank girls every week?) if they didn’t step up their dance mom obligations.

Unlike the original, there was little interest in the actual dance part and more on the  drama and tears, with parents declaring infamous phrases like “I’m done, I’m done.”  It made for nothing but a comical, verbal duel between the parents and coaches with little movement in between, pun intended.