adam larkey/abc/associated press
Emmitt Smith.
DANCE PEEVER: Everybody’s talking about the finale of this season’s Dancing With The Stars, the one where former football player Emmitt Smith won over Saved By The Bell star Mario Lopez. (OK — I just read that online. Nobody I know has been talking about it at all, but then again, I haven’t left the house all day except to buy bananas and Coke, and nobody at the Sobey’s talked about it, and that’s good enough for me.)
Gossip columnist Janet Charlton reported on her website before Wednesday night’s finale that Smith was fixed to win, if only because Lopez had said that he wouldn’t be doing the Dancing With The Stars tour, even if he won, and that just wasn’t right, oh no it wasn’t. Lisa de Moraes of the Washington Post echoed the feelings of most viewers when she said that Smith, while a nimble fellow for a former running back, clearly wasn’t as good a dancer as Lopez, even if he was a crowd favourite.
As co-host Samantha Harris kept reminding viewers, Smith was the only real amateur left in the competition, unlike Lopez, who danced with something called Kids Incorporated. (Other Kids Inc. alumnae include Jennifer Love Hewitt and Fergie from the Black Eyed Peas.) It might be easier to believe in a fix if there wasn’t the whole viewer voting thing to deal with, but who knows — it’s a lot easier to fix a reality show than an election, or so I am told.
The really big news, though, was the ratings — 27 million viewers on average for the show’s finale — bigger, as de Moraes pointed out, than Mr. Eko’s death on Lost, than Katie Couric’s CBS Evening News debut, or Madonna on Oprah. It was the most watched show so far this season, but it was still 5 million viewers behind May’s American Idol finale.
Which has to be kept in mind when you read a Hollywood Reporter story that ABC is openly mulling the idea of putting the next edition of Dancing With The Stars up against American Idol. It’s an inspired, almost heroic move, but I have one word for ABC: Don’t.
Just as the public was willing to vote for Smith — the “regular” guy, the untrained hopeful — against Lopez, the slick, cocky professional, it’s also a sure bet they’ll return to Idol, with its fairy-tale story of young people and aging dreamers getting their big shot, against a show with “Stars” in the title. Has-beens they might be, but the contestants on Dancing With The Stars have awards, big houses, clippings files, filmographies and Super Bowl rings; they’re not regular folks, and if reality TV is anything, it’s the great leveller, with the great proportion of its bell curve weighted toward unknowns.
Watching George Hamilton III or Tucker Carlson try to move like Argentine gigolos is amusing, but it’s a spectacle that will lose when viewers have the choice of watching a bar band singer or a single mother struggle with a Stevie Wonder song. This is what we call a “fact.”
