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Of all the great things about television, the greatest is that it’s on every single day. TV history is being made, day in and day out, in ways big and small. In an effort to better appreciate this history, we’re taking a look back, every day, at one particular TV milestone.
IMPORTANT DATE IN TV HISTORY: July 27, 2011
PROGRAM ORIGINALLY AIRED ON THIS DATE: So You Think You Can Dance, “Top 8 Perform” (Season 8, Episode 18)
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT: The more So You Think You Can Dance stuck around and began to pick up momentum and moved from a cult show to a show with a sizeable fan base, the more that the entertainment community began to flock to the show. Where the guest-chair on the judging panel was once held by a rotating cast of choreographers, by season 8 it was occupied by the likes of Megan Mullally, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, and Ellen Degeneres. As season 8 rounded into its stretch run, they got their glitziest get yet: Lady Gaga.
SYTYCD and Gaga had already enjoyed a mutually beneficial relationship. In fact, Lady Gaga’s first live appearance on American television was on So You Think You Can Dance in the summer of 2008 …
And as the years went by, a spot among Gaga’s dancers ended being a coveted destination for SYTYCD finalists, most prominently Mark Kanemura, who went on to be one of Gaga’s most frequently featured dancers.
So cut to three years later, Lady Gaga is one of the biggest pop stars in the world, and she comes by to guest judge the final 8 dancers. As we saw just this year with her appearance on RuPaul’s Drag Race, Lady Gaga is able to show a depth of appreciation and expertise for artforms that she’s not necessarily expert in. As great a performer as she is, no one will be mistaking Lady Gaga for a world-class dancer. But her enthusiasm for the SYTYCD performers shone through, nowhere more significantly than during the week’s final routine, a rare girl-girl jazz routine between the season’s two standout performers, Sasha Mallory and Melanie Moore. By the point in the season, everybody knew it was going to come down to these two for the finals (it did, with Melanie squeaking out a win), so the expectations for the routine were high.
Not only was this a killer routine, but everything surrounding its reception is priceless. From Gaga talking about a dance tradition of throwing a shoe at great performers (is that a thing? hey, why not!), to her actually throwing her giant platform boot onstage, to the panicked look of concern on Nigel Lythgoe’s face that Gaga’s unscripted boot-toss might injure a fan and lead to a lawsuit, to Gaga name-dropping her album Born This Way semi-organically, to Chicago director Rob Marshall being also there for some reason. It was a total circus, and Lady Gaga, for one night only, was its P.T. Barnum.
