Monsters of Television

Judges be crazy.

I just don’t understand the scoring for the competition in general but especially for this evening. I’m not sure why they even have paddles 1-5 because nothing scores below a six no matter how egregiously a star has crapped the bed. And Chynna Phillips crapped the bed. She looked like she was loopy on ‘ludes the whole dance and somehow STILL came away with more points than Carson, whose dance really didn’t seem all that bad.

It’s Movie Night on Dancing with the Stars which means a host of everything Len hates (and, therefore, I hate) about this show which include gimmicky openings and flashy schtick for every dance. Some did it well (JR’s Pink Panther wasn’t bad, Ricki Lake’s Psycho was great) and some were train wrecks (Flash Gordon? Really, Nancy?). I hate to say that I’ve become a dance purist by watching this show but really it’s just that any opportunity I get to roll my eyes at Nancy Grace and Rob Kardashian is one I’m going to take. Also, Rob Kardashian did me wrong with his Superman paso doble. It looked more like an old man shuffle in some places. But I’m going to assume he’ll be saved in the results show because his video shows him “working hard” and “taking this seriously.”

After a month of watching this show, I’m starting to finally see the strategy employed by not only the dancers but also by the judges to save their favorites. Call me naive but I thought the pre-dance videos were just filler to show while the stars and their partners set up for whatever heinous gimmick they wanted to perform before the dance started. Now I see that they’re almost campaign videos designed to endear themselves to the audience. I suspected that’s what Nancy Grace has been using it for but I just assumed she’s a manipulator and exaggerating for the camera comes naturally to her. The videos this week for certain contestants at the bottom of the pile (*cough* Chaz *cough*) were particularly obvious about what it wanted to do. Sure, it was more fun to have Richard Simmons play the part of Chaz’s Mickey Goldmill than it was to see him whining about everything. But this is clearly propaganda.

On top of that, the judges were just wild with their choices. Full-on bananas. They had to give Ricki Lake 10s because they had nowhere else to go with their voting after rating total crap so high. Between them rating Chynna so high despite her completely failing on the dance floor (all 7s) and Carrie Ann arbitrarily deducting points, citing that she wanted to see something more dramatic from JR after his performance last week (how can you make Pink Panther dramatic?), their scores lost validity this week. Not that I really know how much their scores factor into the no-doubt intense algorithm used to determine Night 2 power rankings anyway.

I can’t even speculate about who’s going home tonight because the scores are so skewed that nothing makes sense to me on this show. Carson seems the most likely candidate since he’s at the bottom of the scoreboard but more deserving are Nancy, Rob, or Chaz. But the judges love Rob (probably for the family bubble butt) and Chaz had Cher-Power behind him. Nancy has her deal with the devil.