Critic Reviews

It’s not great television, but it is a fun ride and you know what you’re getting—and sometimes that’s enough.

You can fast-forward through the dance bits or the narrative bits as taste dictates and probably improve your viewing experience. But I hope the sweat expended by the youngsters in uniformly excellent performances brings them all every kind of success.

It’s consistently inconsistent, purposely tacky and piles cliché upon cliché. It is trash TV. It could be a huge hit. ... The term guilty pleasure seems appropriate here. More guilt than pleasure, though.

Essentially, it suffers from trying to do too much. ... Halfway through the 10 episodes, I simply stopped caring about finding out who pushed Cassie over the edge. Unsurprisingly, the gleaming bright spot of Tiny Pretty Things is the dancing.

Tiny Pretty Things will make you never want to enroll your kids in a ballet class, given how emotionally scarring the art is portrayed to be here. Between that, the cliched characters and the clunky dialogue, you’re better off watching Bunheads over and over instead.

Interspersed dance scenes offer small moments of reprieve and a chance for the cast of trained performers to showcase their skills, but Michael MacLennan’s series seems to prioritize sex appeal above all else, including strong character development, authentic emotion, and a cohesive execution of multiple plot lines.