Well, this is it, the season finale of Dancing With The Stars. ABC decided to make this a two hour event, which is unfortunate for a couple of reasons. First is the fact that this show starts at 9 PM, meaning that it runs until 11 PM.
This is kind of late, especially on a Tuesday night, and I’m sure it will work havoc on my sleep schedule later in the week. Second, there simply isn’t enough compelling content to fill that much time. One hour would have been far more watchable in my opinion. As it is, you could basically have ignored the first hour of the show last night, since it was pretty pointless. The final dances for the contestants didn’t even start until after 10 PM.
Here is a rundown of some of the stuff that happened in the first hour:
- Aly Raisman being eliminated in 4th place. This was pretty shocking to me, as she had a pretty comfortable lead over Jacoby Jones (according to judges scores) going into the show. Just another reason why a show like this should lean even more heavily on judge scoring than fan voting. I mean, isn’t it all supposed to be about how good a dancer you are? Why does fan voting even need to have any impact at all? It is all just people like me, who know nothing about dancing, voting for the person they like best. This is how D.L. Hughley lasted so long on the show, and I simply don’t think fans should have as large a voice as they do.
- Dorothy Hamill came back for a dance, joined by Kristi Yamaguchi near the end. It was good to see Hamill well enough to come back and perform.
- Andy Dick was back dancing as well. Five minutes I will never get back.
- Same with Lisa Vanderpump, who was also back.
- Wynonna Judd sang a song.
- Pitbull and PSY performed.
So, aside from the Raisman 4th place finish, everything else was filler and fluff, trying to get people to keep watching the show up to the actually important final dances for Jacoby, Kellie and Zendaya. I could have done without all of it: just get on with the finale already!
The same principle that I laid out in my blog entry yesterday applied to the finale. Basically, every dance was so good that I couldn’t tell you which performer did the best. Heck, the judges agree with me, as they gave all the pairs perfect scores for their dances on the finale. So much for trying to make up ground or separating yourself from the pack.
In the end, Jacoby’s fan vote could only carry him to 3rd place, and as I predicted yesterday, Kellie’s amazing freestyle performance was probably the catalyst that pushed her fan vote high enough to overcome her slight deficit in judges points to Zendaya. I can’t say that I was upset with who ended up winning. I preferred Zendaya ever so slightly, but Kellie was really just as good a dancer. Congrats to her, and really everyone from Ingo on up the leaderboard. As for the other stars…well…At lest we won’t have to see them on the show again.
So yeah, that’s it for the 16 season of DWTS. I don’t know what I will be posting about next in this space, but rest assured, I probably won’t have much fun doing it.
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