With Dance Moms supervillian Abby Lee Miller heading to the slammer for income fraud, Tara Ward puts her on trial for a few more crimes.

Abby Lee Miller reckons “when a parent opens their mouth, they are ruining their child”. It’s advice to live by, and the reason why all parents should be locked in a dance studio observational mezzanine until their child turns 18 and can mambo their sweet way to freedom.

That sweet freedom just sashayed away from Dance Moms teacher Abby, who was recently sentenced to a year in jail for income fraud. There’ll be no more calling the police to evict irate parents, or comparing her students to road kill, or being rude and obnoxious to small innocent children.

The wicked queen of the dance floor must give up her tarnished crown, possibly purchased with the $120,000 AUD she smuggled into the USA.

But jealousy is a disease, second place is the biggest loser and Dance Moms is all about Abby Lee Miller. You might think it’s criminal for children to be publicly humiliated but honestly, it’s fine because fame and stardom is an amazing thing. If telling a child that they’re useless doesn’t inspire them to dance until their toenails fall off, then nothing will.

Plus, these parents pay Abby $16,000 a year to shout at their child. This is both a bargain and a life hack. Just think of the time it saves parents from yelling at their kids at home. Just jokes. This is me during Dance Moms, wondering what in the name of all things tight and shiny were these people thinking.

Abby committed many crimes during the whirling dervish of insult and emotion that is Dance Moms. Here are five of the most serious. Read ’em and weep.

1) Slander against shapes

Road cones and Toblerone bars everywhere were shocked when Abby claimed this cockamamie photo lineup was a ‘pyramid’. The only thing this structure has in common with a pyramid is that it was glued to a blackboard, a tool as ancient as ye olde Egyptians themselves.

It’s critical to get the angles right if you’re using a polyhedron to destroy the souls of young girls. The last thing I need is to be at the bottom of that triangular shitshow, so let’s put on our maths pants and spend at least three seconds researching the finer points of pyramidical theory.

Holy kick ball change, Abby is a genius. 

2) Not using her inside voice

In space they can’t hear you scream, but I bet they can still hear Abby. Paintings fall off walls, thunder shits itself and the earth is thrust off its axis when Abby starts yelling.

Jam in some ear-plugs, shroud your head in a spool of sequinned lycra and cha-cha your way into a soundproof room before your ears begin to bleed with the salty tears of a thousand child dancers.

3) Overuse of the word ‘snood’

The snood: not heard of since 1945, never want to hear it again. Snoodgate, we salute you.

4) Improper use of a foreign language

According to Abby, a ‘coupe’ is some sort of kicky dance move, and not just a zippy little car that parks like a dream. I reckon Abby’s using every French-sounding word she knows just for the gosh darn heck of it, which is exactly what happens after I down a few wines and watch Amelie for the 489^th time. Excuse moi while I chasse to the boudoir for some pinot noir, au revoir.

5) Backseat driving

Everyone loves a backseat driver, especially when they’re wearing a towel turban and screaming “take the turnpike”. What is a turnpike? Maybe it’s another imaginary French dance move, or perhaps a mysterious Swarvorski-coated boulevard that grapevines us all directly to dance Hades.

Turnpike, hornpipe, running man, whatevs. It’s all the same when you’re trapped in a bus travelling to Fartsack, Kentucky.

Au revoir, Abby Lee Miller. As she leaves the stage for one long dance with justice, may her sequins still sparkle, her turban remain towelly, and may she one day exit onto the turnpike of her dreams.

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The New Zealand showrunners behind Filthy Rich jump the ditch to make Hyde & Seek, a show which seeks to blend a sprawling Homeland-style mystery with the breakneck pace of CSI/SVU.

“You’re on your own,” says Nick, a boyishly handsome homicide cop to his partner, heading off toward a murder victim’s van. Which promptly explodes. We’re about three minutes into the first episode of Hyde & Seek, a cornily-named Australian thriller which debuted on Three on Monday.

So far, so ominous: the series is created by New Zealand showrunners Rachel Lang and Gavin Strawhan, whose shows always seem to start with a big hooky event – a suicide, an arrest, a bomb – as if there’s no other way into a story. Hyde & Seek was their third major production to screen last year (this played in October 2016 in Australia), after Filthy Rich and Dirty Laundry. The productivity is impressive, sure, but it’s hard to escape the sense that some of the deep flaws present in the two New Zealand productions might have been a result of trying to do too much.

Of the trio though, Hyde & Seek is comfortably the best. It follows murder cop Gary Hyde (get it?!), played by ex-leaguie Matt Nable, who’s auditioning for Russell Crowe’s taciturn tough Australian spot and seems a good bet to get it. He’s the one whose partner gets blown up at the start, and who then has to go to his son’s birthday party and tell Nick’s pregnant partner than her husband’s passed.

It’s upsetting news, so she’s upset. But everyone else is weirdly unruffled, up to and including his partner and bestie Nable. A commanding officer tells him “this isn’t a vendetta – you make it one you’re off the case,” yet he mostly seems a bit frustrated. The most jarring element of the opening episode is its emotional calibration: a beloved colleague and expectant father is blown up and the most annoying thing for all affected seems to be the jurisdictional squabbling it creates within the investigation.

The fact is Hyde & Seek didn’t need the bomb – once it’s rolling it does fine. There’s a chain of events under way which see the scope of the investigation and its implications widen every few minutes. The cop gets renditioned out of a routine interview by the federal police; the dead man’s a Kiwi; he’s there under an assumed name; he’s doing electrics at a hotel where a big political conference is due to be held; he’s linked to the Madrid bombings; he’s associated with some suspected Islamic terrorists; hence yet another slick dude gets to tell Nable that he “doesn’t have appropriate clearance”.

It’s a lot to take in.

What it means is we have the pace of a mystery of the week crime show and the scope of a Homeland-style sprawling intergovernmental investigation. The two styles sit vaguely uneasily beside one another, but the performances and a more terse, clipped writing than Filthy/Dirty mean it mostly carries it off.

The conclusion, in which the arrest of some purported terrorists becomes a sniper-ridden bloodbath, is both the most ludicrous and tense moment of the debut episode. The position of the assailants is unclear to all, and the sense of a routine crime having gotten unimaginably huge on all the participants is clear and impressively conveyed.

It wasn’t enough – Hyde & Seek hasn’t been renewed for a second season. But it shows that the team TVNZ has backed to make its big budget television isn’t incapable of turning out taut, entertaining television. We’ll have to wait until the return of Filthy Rich later this year to see whether they’ve learned enough across the ditch to raise that series above its hokey debut.

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