There are doubtless blogs with a wider readership than this one -- every other one on Earth, at this point -- so I'm not figuring my opinions will make it all the way to the marbled halls of ABC, but then this is an opinion piece and not an advice column, so I will have at least vented.
Last night, we were treated to an appearance on the ABC show "Dancing with the Stars" of the UK singer Jessie J., singing a song at the opening of the show. Unfortunately, instead of going back to the dressing room, the green room or the audience, she then took a seat as a guest judge, next to Carrie Ann Inaba, Julianne Hough and Bruno Tonioli, all of whom are professional dancers and choreographers of immense talent and experience.
What was ABC (or the show's producers) thinking? First of all, I doubt anyone had heard of this singer prior to the blitz of her name being all over ABC in recent weeks with guest appearances, so her opinions on the dancers were not grounded in anything the audience would recognize. Second, even before she gave her rambling and uneducated scores and opinions, each twice the air time of the actual experts, it was evident that she didn't know anything about professional dance.
What is "Dancing with the Stars"? It is a show where experienced and talented professional dancers work hard with celebrity non-dancer competitors, to learn a new 60-90-second dance or two each week, and then perform it in front of millions, live on TV. They are normally judged as to the content of each dance, each of which has "rules" known to dancers everywhere, as well as on the choreography and, of course, the performance. They are scored by the judges and voted on by the TV audience, under a system where the relative scores of the expert judges are of equal weight with the relative number of votes of the fans.
Accordingly, the celebrities and their professional partners no doubt want the evaluation of their performances to be accurate and reasonable, since their continuation on the show is dependent on being positively responded to and, perhaps more, they have worked their tails off all week and are due that respect. There are plenty of disagreements between the competitors (particularly the professionals of the pairs) and the judges, in that within the artistic bounds of choreography, if you are assigned to do a samba, say, your result needs to look like a samba.
So how is one to react when right out of the gate, the guest "judge", this Jessie J., gives the first competitor a score clearly two points (on a 1-10 scale) lower than the professional judges? My first reaction was that she'd better run low on all the rest of the competitors, otherwise the first scores will skew the spectrum for the evening. Knowing that she wasn't going to do that (she clearly didn't come across as astute enough to know that she had to do that to be fair), the first team is probably still steaming. I certainly would be -- a cheap publicity stunt for a singer that ABC clearly had a financial interest in, affected the integrity of the competition.
If ABC is listening, please, please drop the whole "guest judge" gig. After 14 seasons of this show, its viewers deserve a level of sanctity in the way the judging is done and the scoring recorded. Last night's episode was clearly going to be a problem from the moment the first scoring paddles went up. You added a fourth judge this year; this solved the problem of what to do in those weeks when head judge Len Goodman was back in the UK periodically; you had three professionals remaining to cover. Then you went and made it a problem all over again by corrupting the judging with someone who wouldn't know a rumba from a Roomba.
Just don't do it.
Copyright 2014 by Robert Sutton
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