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The Guardian // World // Europe

Dreamers review – this teen dance drama is too subtle for its own good. Where’s the debauchery?

Sunday 30th March 2025, 9:30PM

Where other teen shows ramp up the sex, drugs and scandal, this Leeds-set saga about rivalries in a dance school keeps it real – so real it almost refuses to be entertainingThe implausibility of the teen drama may well be the genre’s defining feature. In the 00s, we were subjected to untold glamour and relentless wisecracking by US imports such as The OC and Gossip Girl. The UK equivalent was Skins, in which a group of Bristolian party animals managed to make practically every personal problem known to man look intimidatingly cool. More recently, we’ve had mind-blowing levels of debauchery from Euphoria, mind-blowing levels of sexual literacy and candour from Sex Education and mind-blowing levels of heartwarming niceness from Heartstopper. All of it is ludicrous in its own way.Dreamers is different. It is realistic – jarringly so. That’s both a pro and a con for this Channel 4 drama about a group of teenage dancers living in Leeds. The series – written by Lisa Holdsworth (Waterloo Road) and Gem Copping (EastEnders), and directed by Sara Dunlop – is filmed in a meticulously naturalistic way. The camera tends to linger, documentary-style, on characters, whether they are doing something interesting or not: chatting aimlessly, walking to work, getting a glass of water. It’s very kitchen sink, not least in the sense that there are multiple shots of actual kitchen sinks. (The show’s original title was Dance School, which captures the no-frills, matter-of-fact mode far better than Dreamers.) The dialogue is sparse

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