Will They Cry Again? Dance Moms Reunite For 2024 Special

So will their mothers: Jessalynn Siwa, Kira Hilliker, Kelly Hyland, Christi Lukasiak and Jill Vertes. They’re all in the trailer the Lifetime channel has released to promote its new show.

The mothers were constantly yelling, the daughters were constantly being told they had to perform better, and all in all it was a perfect storm of car-crash reality TV. People couldn’t look away!

The trailer started off with the cast happily partying together and popping Champagne bottles. But fans of the previous series won’t be surprised to learn that events soon took a darker turn.

“The fight happened, and we never danced again,” Kelly’s daughter Brooke said. “I feel like I ruined your life and your dance career,” Kelly said, as other people who were involved cried and left the set.

“I thought I wasn’t enough, like, in every single way,” a clearly distraught Chloe Lukasiak remembered while choking back the tears. But more on Miller and her ignominious fate later.

In the days before the trailer, JoJo had written on social media, “Grateful for this day! For everyone wondering about the few people missing, everyone was invited today but only some wanted to be here.”

Another said, “You can tell that time of their lives was very traumatic. I also think that Nia is busy with school. JoJo wasn’t there that long, so for her to be dissing them is kinda messed up tbh.”

“We got pulled out of school every day to go to dance and film a TV show, so that was not normal at all,” Maddie said. And Kenzie declared, “Our teacher, the environment we were in — it was all very stressful as a kid.”

And Kenzie has also worked with Sia, plus she has built herself a massive following online. By and large the sisters have done very well for themselves in the cut-throat world of entertainment.

“I had more stress at that age than I did once I left,” she told Cosmopolitan in 2022. “I have dissociated so much from that time. I’ll see fans post scenes from Dance Moms and I’m like, ‘I literally don’t even remember that happening.’”

“My dance teacher taught that if you don’t get the trophy, if you don’t get the crown, you are less than, which is the worst way to train a kid,” she said. “It carries into other life lessons.”

“For the longest time, we felt so guilty,” Maddie said. “She trained me, she helped me, but also, I knew I would be okay without her and I was sick of being in a toxic environment. I was like, “This is not for me. I can’t do this.” I haven’t spoken to her since.”

She claimed that she’d “loved” Ziegler, and had been “fighting for everything for these kids to be the best that they could be on television.” She said, “I know that what I did for Maddie, with Maddie, helped her succeed.”

In 2021 she’d told Forbes, “As a child, it was a lot to endure: a lot of yelling, a lot of swearing, being put down all the time… The show was super-negative, but I try my best to turn it into a positive.”

The court documents were made public in 2017 and they alleged, “Miller even tossed a chair during a confrontation with Paige while [her mother] Kelly Hyland was not present, causing Paige to run from the room terrified, as she feared she would be physically injured by Miller.”

She ended up being sentenced to one year and a day in federal prison. She began her sentence in July 2017 and was released in May 2018 due to good behavior.

“DMA feels [Dance Moms] is a total misrepresentation of our dance educators and their students and is detrimental to the dance profession,” the organization said in a statement at the time.

In 2020 — during the height of the Black Lives Matter movement — Miller posted a black square to Instagram in supposed solidarity. This spurred a dance mom from one of the later seasons, Adriana Smith, to allege that Miller had been racist towards her. 

“That, my friends, is not something or a statement that can be Googled. Ask yourself, What does that mean? This to me shows that you think you are better than me and in high rank and altogether superior to ME!”

“[Miller] tried to spin Camryn as being the poor one and there on scholarship. I shut that down immediately,” Camille said. “She loves appropriating our culture and never appreciating it. She did not give black choreographers on the show acknowledgement of their work.”

She went on, “While I cannot change the past or remove the harm I have done, I promise to educate myself, learn, grow, and do better.” But it wasn’t enough. The Lifetime network canceled a new planned show with Miller, Abby’s Virtual Dance-Off, and cut all ties with her.

“I shouldn’t have my first kiss like this,” Ziegler said on the show. And she was absolutely right. Considering that, it’s really no surprise she didn’t come back for the reunion.

During that episode, Jill Vertes insisted that her daughter Kendall should play Parks, rather than Nia Sioux, who was the only Black dancer on the team. Whether that incident will come up in the reunion remains to be seen.

Generally they’ve all been very successful. And obviously, ahead of the new episode airing, we have no real idea of precisely what will unfold on our screens. But let’s hope that during the reunion, they congratulate each other on their triumphs.

Miller knows about this and she doesn’t seem happy about it. “I’m not aware of JoJo saying hurtful things. She just does these TikTok videos with my voice, and so it makes me look really bad,” she told the U.S. Sun in 2023.

She went on, “I just congratulated her, texted her yesterday and she texts right back. No matter what I say, when I say it — even if I'm giving her corrections — she always gets back to me immediately. And she said, ‘I love you. Thank you.’”

In 2019 she went on a concert tour, D.R.E.A.M. The Tour, and that too was a hit. So significant has been her rise that the following year she was even named one of the world’s most influential people by Time magazine.

She went on, “Because that's how I have always been my whole life is just like, my human is my human.” Chances are this will be mentioned in the reunion show. JoJo’s mother Jessalynn fully supports her daughter, and she’ll be there too of course.

“We never were really allowed to vocalize how we felt,” she said. “And I definitely held a lot in of how I was feeling and what was going on just because I obviously wanted to be the best.”

She went on, “If she didn't bring me on to the show, I wouldn't have the career that I have.” But she did also add, “For me, it was really, really hard. And I obviously have anxiety and other things probably stemming from being on the show.”

And yet JoJo, Miller’s friend, didn’t like that. She wrote, “It’s one thing to just not add her back, it’s another to post it.” In the wake of that reaction, Brooke had deleted the post. Will that come up when they reunite?

She ended up becoming a YouTuber. “I used to watch YouTube videos a lot, so I thought that it would be a good way to interact with my fans and for them to see what I’m doing now,” she told website the International Business Times that year.

“I dance, but I’m not in a studio right now,” she had told the outlet. “I’m just taking different classes at different places. Different teachers teach different ways, so it’s nice.”

By 2022 she had seemingly stepped away from the limelight altogether: she was working as a marketing intern for the company FlexScreen, and she hadn’t posted anything new to her YouTube channel for nearly a decade.

She launched a project called “Chloe’s Book Club” in 2018 and has been writing short stories, poetry, and segments for anthology books. She’s also said she’d love to write a fantasy book series.

She told E! Online that her experience with Dance Moms had inspired her to do it. “I was like, ‘What's my full circle moment with dance? What does that mean for me now as an adult?’” she said.

She further explained, “Even though it was difficult, at the end of the day anyone who's in a really difficult sport like that goes through some degree of what we went through as well.”

She’s also done a bit of acting, but perhaps her most impressive achievement is the sheer scale of her following on her social media channels: she has over 11 million people hanging on her every word.

Miller is probably wishing she was invited: after all, the conversation is almost inevitably going to turn towards her. We’ll just have to wait with bated breath to see what happens.