Dancing with the Wrong Stars

Last night was the final episode of the latest cycle of "Dancing with the Stars", a TV show that matches professional ballroom dancers with celebrities of various levels on the alphabet-list.  The pairs do actual ballroom-based routines each week, with one couple dropped each week until a winner is crowned.

Last night the winner was a young man named Jordan Fisher, a Broadway actor, singer and dancer (mind that, please) whom I had never heard of before the competition.  He appeared in the Broadway production of Hamilton, which I had heard of, of course, but outside New York the recognition of Broadway types drops off dramatically until it approaches "Say who?" by the time it gets down to the Carolinas.

I was disappointed for the show that he won.  Not for the young man, who appears to be an extremely nice fellow, humble, likable and obviously immensely talented.  He was clearly -- too clearly -- the most talented dancer of the dozen or so celebrities who started the competition months back.

But as one judge said in the first week, and I'll paraphrase but approximate what she said -- "No one should be this good the first week."  Exactly.  That's the point.

You probably have seen the show, but in case you don't know the basics, here goes quickly.  "Ballroom" is a formal branch of dance, with specific rules for each dance -- waltz, cha-cha, rumba, quickstep, etc. -- that must be followed in competition so that the dance is legit.  The professional partners choreograph about a 90-second routine, around the assigned dance with the assigned music, each week.

The couples perform, and three judges give scores on a 10-point scale.  The total of all points to all competitors are added, and (behind the scenes) a couple is given a score that is the percentage of their points, to the total points given out.  For a day or two after the show airs, people vote in from the Internet and phone, and all those votes are added.  A couple is given a score that is the percentage that their audience vote total is, of the total of all votes for everyone.  The judge-percentage score and the audience-percentage score are added, and the lowest number gets the couple booted off on the next show.

So ... who are the celebrities, and why am I writing this?  Well, the "why" depends on why you think the show even exists.  Remember what the proper answer is to almost any question that starts with "Why"?  I'll remind you.  "FTM" ... "Follow the money."  So any notion of fairness or suitability pales before the fact that DWTS, the show itself, is there to sell advertising and earn dollars.

Here's the problem for a lot of us, and certainly for me.  The attraction of the show is that the celebrities are (supposedly) not dancers, they are athletes or singers or actors, skaters, governors, writers, an astronaut here and there, a disproportionate number of Disney kids (Disney owns ABC, the network on which DWTS airs), and YouTube "sensations."  It is attractive to us as viewers not just to see them bumble around the stage Week One, as they try to learn choreographed ballroom routines, but as they improve over the weeks of the show.

I'm only I; I can't tell you why you do or don't watch the show.  But to me, the journey is fascinating.  Drew Scott of Property Brothers fame was on this year, and he was as graceful as an old mill horse at the start.  He survived somehow to the final week, and while he didn't ever become a marvelous ballroom dancer, he got a heck of a lot better by the end.  That, friends, was fun to watch.

What was not fun, though, was watching Jordan Fisher.  It should have been fun -- a great talent, a nice kid, and all.  But you got the sense early on that he simply didn't belong there, as if it were the case of a professional operating in a higher league, Nolan Ryan pitching to Little Leaguers.  Here was a young man whose profession includes singing and dancing on Broadway.  What was the thinking that he should compete in this?

"Sure", I hear you remind me, "Ballroom is different."  Well, yes, it is.  But at a certain level of capability in the profession, learning ballroom routines for a Broadway star is no different from learning the choreography for a new show, except having to avoid improvising aspects (like the hold and the footwork) that are specific to each dance.  Jordan Fisher already was at that level.  So while here was a trained entertainer with a strong background, the others are not paid to dance as part of their living.

I started to feel this way some years back when Kristi Yamaguchi, the Olympic figure skating champion, also won.  Figure skaters are trained in what are essentially dance routines, and they start really young.  She was competing with people like Penn Jillette, Steve Guttenberg, Adam Carolla and Priscilla Presley.  She was amazing from the start.  Was it a surprise at the end?  Not much.

In this season's case, only two things were going to happen.  Fisher was going to win, in which case it was a foregone conclusion for three months that took the starch out of the competitive interest in the show (i.e., what keeps men interested).  Or, he was not going to win, in which case the winner would have to have been someone markedly less of a dancer, turning the competition into a popularity contest that it shouldn't be.

I could really appreciate Dancing with the Stars a lot more if a bit more thought went into balancing the selection of contestants.  Granted, you run out of B-listers eventually, but either way, it is still a competition show, and if the competition is rather uneven from the first week because someone is, you know, a professional already, it de-starches the premise.

I imagine that I'm ultimately asking for poorer-dancing "Stars", and yes, that's probably right.  It's the journey, after all, a celebrity convincing the judges and voters that you are going to get better, you're going to improve and work hard.  That ballroom is important to you while you're in the competition.  That's my winner, I think.

It's not the Broadway star with a 50-mile head start.

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
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