Dance Your Ass Off

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

A Reality TV show where a number of overweight individuals compete to lose the greatest amount of weight. But wait, doesn't it seem a little familiar? Yes, it does. So what minor thing are we going to change just so people will regard it as being instantly original? We'll make them learn to dance too!

So basically, what you get is The Biggest Loser vs. Dancing With the Stars'; a number of overweight individuals compete to try and see how much weight they can lose through group exercise challenges. Each week, the contestants also have to perform a dance routine with a celebrity partner to impress a panel of judges (Danny Teeson, Lisa Ann Walter, and a weekly guest judge), with each week being themed around a different genre or style. The judges' scores are averaged and combined with the percentage of body weight lost during that week during the all-important weigh-in to see who stays and who goes.

When the show debuted on Oxygen Network (which is by the way, a network aimed towards women, despite the fact that there are male contestants too), it quickly became one of their most popular shows, averaging over four million viewers for its first night. Though, it has also became a frequent target for parody and satire, especially on a certain E! show.

Tropes used in Dance Your Ass Off include:
  • Confession Cam: Of course.
  • Completely Missing the Point/Did Not Do the Research: When Nine Network picked this show up as a summer series, its premiere promptly bombed and only got around 796,000 viewers (in comparison to the top-rated that night, which got 1.6 million). Critics immediately pointed out that this show came from a cable channel aimed towards women, and as a result, didn't have the mass appeal networked shows should have. As such, it then got shoved onto one of their digital television services.
  • Lucky Charms Title: The show's logo censors the last two letters of "ass" with stars, though some sources censor it with asterisks instead, or don't censor it at all.
  • X Meets Y: The Biggest Loser meets Dancing With the Stars