Over the past four seasons, Lifetime’s Dance Moms has rapidly become one of the most popular reality shows on television, particularly with girls under the age of 18. Nearly two million viewers tuned into last week’s Season 5 premiere, which features Pittsburgh’s Abby Lee Miller and a troupe of elite dancers ranging from eight to fifteen years old.
If you aren’t familiar with the show, it follows Miller and her team of dancers to competitions across the country. The dancers—Maddie Ziegler, McKenzie Ziegler, Nia Frazier, and Kendall Vertes—are almost a subplot in Dance Moms, which often centers its narrative on the tension between the insufferable Miller and the dancers’ equally insufferable mothers. And, unlike other reality shows where the drama is painfully staged, Dance Moms seems to have some legit real-life chaos. Just last month, a Pennsylvania judge dismissed an assault claim brought against Miller by one of her former students and Dance Moms star, Paige Hyland.
I am one of those nearly two million people that have made Dance Moms and its stars a success. I am admittedly part of the problem when we talk about the exploitative voyeurism that comes along with reality television, but I can’t help it. I’m deeply sucked in. The show’s dancers are incredibly talented; see Maddie Ziegler, made widely famous by Sia and now Shia Leboeuf. (Incidentally, a departed Dance Moms star recently gave a quote saying she “threw up” while watching Maddie in the video.) And while the drama that comes from the show’s bossy coach and high-strung moms is entertaining—and certainly emphasized by the show’s producers—most Dance Moms viewers are watching because they love the dancers.
Or so I thought. Then I uncovered the strange Instagram world dedicated to the show’s barely pubescent stars, and realized that maybe “love” isn’t the best way to describe it. “Obsession” is more accurate, and in fact, love barely seems present in the way that, over social media, millions of girls across the globe have carved out a fairly scary niche where they can share photos, chat, fight over, and tell stories about the group of young dancers that they see on their television screens every week.
Teenage girls are, of course, gloriously unhinged when it comes to their favorite celebrities. They always have been. They crowded stadiums and fainted when the Beatles played, and wrote love letters to themselves from Leonardo DiCaprio in notebooks plastered with BOP! cutouts of Andrew Keegan, J.T.T. and Jared Leto’s faces. It would be a lie to say that I never scribbled “Mrs. Jonathan Taylor Thomas” in a super-secret notebook. But while the instinct behind this obsession is the same, the degree and type of interactions young fans can have with young celebrities today is undeniably different, and the results can be beyond the pale.
A major factor in young girls’ obsession with their favorite celebrities is accessibility, or the illusion of it. I remember in the back of those BOP! and Teen Beat magazines, there were always addresses to mailboxes where you could send letters “directly” to your favorite celebrities. (And I sent them. Did you get all those letters, J.T.T.? LMK.) Still, prior to the Internet, you were unlikely to ever actually pop up in the line of sight of a celebrity unless you ran into them in Hollywood on vacation or something.
But now, the line that that separates young celebrities and their fans online is much thinner. To begin with, the difference between the two categories can be hard to distinguish from an outsider point of view: social media is cluttered with thousands of fake accounts in the girls’ names. Some are obvious “tribute” accounts, where the account owner constantly professes their love for the show or a particular star, but sometimes those tribute accounts look no different than the real stars’ accounts. There are also plenty of accounts that are clearly pretending to be Maddie or Nia or Kendall, or even girls and boys who just guest-starred or appeared in a short story arc.
And the truly enterprising Dance Moms fans, those with a little bit of technological skill, can obtain unprecedented access to their targets with just a few clicks. Many of these girls—and they all seem to be girls—are impressively good at the Internet. They’re able to activate Instagram follower bots and spam hundreds of accounts with comments. They Photoshop images of the girls with ease and generally get up to things that even reasonably-skilled adults might have trouble accomplishing or even understanding.
Which means that as their popularity has risen, intrusions on the Dance Moms stars’ privacy have exploded. The girls’ Instagram accounts are regularly hacked. On YouTube, there are dozens of videos featuring young girls who claim to have Maddie Ziegler or former show star Chloe Lukasiak’s real phone number.
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