I'll take a stab. I'm American, and watched it. It started out kind of cute and then went downhill, IMHO. If you go hereforums.televisionwithoutpity.com/index.php?showtopic=3213000&st=0 there's a forum of 153 pages that discusses the progression of all the episodes shown so far and other people's reactions to it (obviously major spoiler alert, so yo probably don't want to read it, but if you don't mind being spoiled and getting info about the show, I included it, anyway.) you can see that I'm far from alone in my opinion that it is a good premise and had a promising start, but has faltered down the line.
I've never seen GG, but the consensus on the forum is basically the show is just a rehashing of GG in a dance setting, even using a bunch of the same people from GG as guest actors and Kelly Bishop. Lots of people are complaining of recycled storylines and in-jokes and cutesy writing that is intended to pay homage to GG, but those that have watched GG say it falls short and is distracting. It sounds like just about every character that was in GG has a counterpart here, and they said even the town of Paradise (where Bunheads is set) is exactly like the town of wherever GG was set) The other issues were that several characters haven't had much development to explain their purpose, and others were well-developed and then all of a sudden veered into inexplicable behavior. A lot of people watched for the dancing, and were disappointed how little they actually danced, considering what great talent they have. Although Amy S-P has said that there is much more dancing in the 2nd half of the season.
It might have a chance to redeem itself, though, because of the odd way they are showing it. Basically they only did something like 10-12 episodes (it went off the air months ago, so not sure of how many) and then the network decided to pick it up for a full season, and there has been a long break, and it will come back sometime this month for the last half of the season. This could be good, because those associated with the show can read a lot of the criticism posted about the show and take it to heart and fix the problems, because the central idea of the show seems entertaining and solid. I stopped watching the last few episodes, and read the forum linked to above, instead, which didn't do anything to make me want to watch them, and I will probably tune in to the new season when it starts, but if they haven't fixed all the problems, I'm out. The good news for this show is several TV critics (that seem to have the same views about the show as I have) say the show definitely got lost, but have seen some new un-aired episodes and that the show has gotten back on the track it started on.
(HTH, I've tried to say very little about the plot so you wouldn't be spoiled when you finally get to watch it.)