When Bunheads premiered last summer, I wasn't immediately convinced. Though I was a big fan of Gilmore Girls and was thus eager to see what creator Amy Sherman-Palladino had up her sleeve, the pilot rang a bit false. It brought its main character, Vegas showgirl Michelle (Foster), to the quirky town of Paradise by having her marry a man who basically stalked her, only to have him then promptly die, leaving Michelle with his sassy mother, dance instructor Fanny (Kelly Bishop). It felt too easy to just up and kill a character like that, simply to give the show its somewhat rickety setup. Disappointed, I set it aside.

But as the TV Twitter mafia started slathering on the praise, I returned to it and quickly fell under its quirky spell. The odd set-up mechanism gone, the show honed in on the actual Bunheads, telling the stories of four relatively ordinary teenage girls through humor and dance. Sure, the show has outlandish moments—there's an incident with mace and The Nutcracker—but mostly it's about girls who talk really quickly navigating friendships and relationships. The stakes aren't particularly high, but the show connects where it counts. But, truly, it's the dances that sell you. VanDerWerff explains that "what makes Bunheads worth saving is the dancing" and he's right. Often people cite the "Istanbul" dance as an example of what the show could do with it dance scenes, but I was partial to this number, Erin McKeown's "You, Sailor." The dances work on their own, but are even better when reflecting the mood of the show. Watching this one, I sobbed. (Sobbing is not uncommon when watching Bunheads.)

Many of the calls for Bunheads's survival focus on what the show is up against. Poniewozik explained that he wrote his piece about Bunheads in the midst of researching a piece "about the profusion of gory violence in TV dramas today." Though, yes, someone did die in the pilot, Bunheads is not at all grim. It's cheery, it's sweet, it's honest, and that's a rarity on TV today, where everyone's an anti-hero in a dark and gloomy world.

There is much more about what makes this show so worthy of rescue out there in the rest of the "save Bunheads" canon. There are plenty of good reasons to keep the show on the air, but those sadly may not add up to a mandate for the network—which, as Margaret Lyons wrote in Vulture yesterday, has plenty of other worthwhile options.

Yes, it would be great for Bunheads to survive on its merits as a wonderful, innocent show. But, if the axe does fall, we're prepared to let go, something we've advised doing in the past. If it is the end, at least the season-closing dance will be pretty great way to remember the show. It's a high note to go out on, if Bunheads has to go out at all.

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.