Every 20 years or so dance appears on television in a big way. In the 1980s we had Solid Gold, Dance Fever, and Soul Train. In the 1960s there were Shindig and Hullabaloo. When I was a kid my mother let me watch some of these shows after she brought me home from ballet. The Solid Gold dancers in their trademark gold lame leotards were cultural icons even a serious baby ballerina like me could adore. Besides, they were the only dancers on TV.

This year may mark the peak of the latest television dance craze. There are four major dance shows on networks and major cable this year, two new and two returning. Like dance shows past, they're all contests. And whereas dance shows past did little more than animate the week's Top 10, today's shows aspire to serious dance. But the rules have changed.

Take Dancing with the Stars. Open a tabloid and you'll see that Americans love to catch celebrities in awkward moments. Learning a new ballroom dance weekly is an impossible task for a nondancer and a surefire way to make actors and models and talk show hosts look like idiots. The contestants' partners pick up the slack and come out looking like heroes in all the spandex and beading. But it is nice to see the "stars" enjoying the process and learning to respect the dance. You can tell they try to get the moves right. Like all reality TV, Dancing with the Stars is a postmodern

The show is a test of its contestants' work ethic, and as Martha Graham once said, "Movement never lies."

Welcome to dance reality TV. With names like So You Think You Can Dance and Step It Up and Dance, the shows aim to instruct audiences in what professional dancing is and what it takes to get the rare dance job. Of course, along the way there will be lots of good trash television: Dancers, young, attractive, self-involved, and long-suffering performers usually hopped up on cigarettes and coffee, will do physically whatever producers ask of them. The job market is extremely competitive and (cue the vindictive celebrity judge) brutally honest. Plenty of opportunity for conflict and wounded egos. But with all this inherent drama, what about the dancing?

The best show is Randy Jackson Presents America's Best Dance Crew on MTV. Jackson's first independent production, it is smart, entertaining, and the dancing is phenomenal. The contestants are dance "crews," hip-hop for dance teams. By limiting itself to hip-hop the show teaches viewers to recognize hip-hop dance vocabulary and choreographic styles. (Viewers picked Jabbawockeez, a technically impressive crew with a distinct aesthetic, as this season's winner.)

One of the nice things about ABDC is that it is the first to feature dancers as creative artists. In addition to the choreography, the crews are responsible for their costumes and, in some cases, the musical arrangement. The challenges this season included creating dances that narrate the history of street dancing, remixing a Michael Jackson music video, animating a popular club dance, and adapting a Broadway musical style. The crews' responses were, at times, extremely sophisticated.