Bunheads: Season 1
  • Network: ABC Family
  • Series Premiere Date: Jun 11, 2012
  • Season #: 1
User Score
7.6 out of 10

Generally favorable reviews- based on 38 Ratings

User score distribution:
  1. Positive: 30 out of 38
  2. Mixed: 4 out of 38
  3. Negative: 4 out of 38

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  1. lancekoz
    Jun 22, 2012
    4
    This review contains spoilers, click expand to view. I wanted to like this. It's snappy enough and pretty and has actors with charm but not overly beautiful, which I am usually a fan of, but it is just painfully over the top with some crazy characters who don't shut up and others who don't ever express themselves. Is it just me, or are characters speaking too fast these days, spinning out all sorts of eclectic references to make cleverer-than-thou jokes? And the only male character (of the first two episodes) dies.... leaving us with a whole world of sniping, cranky women and girls. Any show that has ballet dancing to Tom Waits and jokes about making **** napkins with the Dalai Lama's face on them is maybe trying just a bit too hard.… Expand
  2. retiredat56
    Jun 12, 2012
    3
    The premise of the story is absurd. A highly talented, former APT ballet dancer goes off to Vegas because the pay is better as a chorus line showgirl. Right. Then, after a few years wasting her talent, sick of the partying life, she goes to Boring Town USA with a guy who visits her once a month or so in Vegas, whom she really doesn't like but marries anyway. Of course. The main characters are depicted as both witless and very bright at the same time. The townspeople are depicted as witless boobs still living some time in the 50's. It as though TV, radio and the internet haven't penetrated the city walls yet. The acting is mixed, some of it very good but it is the writing and story line that need the most work.… Expand
  3. Hipsteran
    Jun 13, 2012
    4
    While watching Bunheads, the thing that I thought about over and over again was the similarity between the show and the horrendous Turkish soaps. Bunheads, doesn't have a realistic plot, the dots just do not connect. Why would a promising ballet move to Vegas? Why would she marry her stalker? How is she 25 years old? And mostly why would ABC Family order this Lifetime-type show while the network is clearly all about teenagers? Maybe I just don't like the whole genre, and therefore I didn't enjoy the pilot, but I know that I'm never gonna watch it again.… Expand
  4. miribeau
    Aug 4, 2012
    1
    A show for women who hate men, from the creator of Gilmore Girls.... This program offers the standard rehashing of Gilmore Girls. Sadly, that rehashing is more in line with the last two seasons of that program. Rory was busy (filming movies) so they added some other young person and, I think, Lane had some kids... or something. Who can remember? Who even cares? What is important here is that Bunheads, lacking an interesting Rory-type character, revolves around, not one, but four uninteresting, poorly conceived, teenage ballet students who take classes from a women who is a combination of Miss Patty (in that she teaches dance) and Emily Gilmore (in that she is exactly the same, is played by the same actress and spends all her time yelling and having meltdowns). The central Lorelai type character is actually a decent Lorelai clone. That being said, I never realized how annoying and how unrealistic Lorelai was as a character until watching this program. There are no spoilers here, trust me. It will seem like there are. There aren't. The central Lorelai-type woman, name not worth remembering, 25 years old, is a failed, some sort of stage dancer, dancing acting failure from Las Vegas. She is 25 years old, because the writers think anyone who is not at the peak of their career by age 25 is a failure. She is mean and horrible to a nice man who has fallen in love with her (because she's a pretty dancer and because his mother was a horrible meany who left him broken for life and incapable of loving any woman who doesn't call him a loser) and, of course, she doesn't care about him, not one bit, even though he keeps coming back to Vegas (for work) and every time he does he goes to see her, watches her stupid call-girl dancing show and tries to get the mean horrible woman (who fakes being sick so she can avoid him) to go to dinner with him... and she does... and she gets drunk because that's what girls like her do (in the writers' worldview) and she marries him, waking up the next day in his car on the way to his home as his new bride. She is annoyed and nervous and wants to go home until she sees his nice house and decides to be a money-grubber. They have sex once, he dies right afterwards and the pilot ends. That's right. I said "pilot". Thereafter, the show revolves around the four boring, nameless, teenage ballet students and the angry mother-in-law who is brilliantly played by a veteran actress who deserves better writing and a better supporting cast and, while we're at it, a better career than she currently has and, let's not forget, the Vegas prostitute who inherited a house and a bunch of land (in Southern California, no less) all for sleeping with a sad, lonely man, one time. The message of the show is clear: Women need men for one thing and that thing is money. Women need men to earn money which they can then give to women or can leave to them in their new wills. Men, according to writer Palladino, are also, apparently, quite stupid. The plot, which moves on from this point in an endless meandering stream of bulls**t, is as simple as it is insulting: Prostitute keeps windfall from man who foolishly loved her (even though she didn't love him) and as a penalty for keeping all the money she allows his mother to stay in her home and keep her ballet studio where she teaches some girls who talk a lot and have "teenage problems" and, by proving she is not so heartless as she seems, somehow makes some small percentage of the viewing public not hate her guts. Don't watch this. By the way, the score of one was awarded purely out of professional love for Alan Ruck who deserves so much better than to be killed off so a struggling network can afford to pay all the little children's salaries and their on-set tutors. I'd thought, at the end of the pilot, that his character might have faked his death just to force his mother and new wife to work together, to bring them into the reality of their new situation and get them each to stand on their own two feet, as it were, and he'd show up in each episode watching them from afar only to return triumphant in episode four or five but, sadly, this did not occur. The writers really meant in when they killed Hubble. (See? His name, I can remember.) They meant it and, even if they tried to take it back, I'm so offended by the portrayal of women as sad, pathetic, dependents who can't fend for themselves without living off their male children or marrying well and then finding themselves conveniently widowed (so as to avoid all that pesky work of actually being a good wife and friend and daughter in law) that I wouldn't watch this again, even if Ruck himself introduced an episode by saying, "Amy Sherman Palladino would like to apologize and let everyone know that she does not, in fact, hate all men and secretly wish her husband would die so she could have all his money." (But, I'd probably watch the clip of that on YouTube, if I'm being honest.)… Expand

Critic Reviews

All reviews »
Metascore
74 out of 100

Generally favorable reviews - based on 20 Critics

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 19 out of 20
  2. Mixed: 1 out of 20
  3. Negative: 0 out of 20
  1. PopMatters
    Reviewed by: Chris Conaton
    Jan 7, 2013
    70
    At last, Sasha is less a collection of TV teenager tropes and more convincingly a Sherman-Palladino creation.
    Read full review
  2. New York Daily News
    Reviewed by: Dave Kehr
    Dec 31, 2012
    80
    It's worth the effort to figure out what this offbeat cast of characters is up to.
    Read full review
  3. St. Louis Post-Dispatch
    Reviewed by: Gail Pennington
    Aug 27, 2012
    75
    A show that is beautiful and sweet, funny and touching.
    Read full review
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