Dancing With the Stars: Week 4

The Show

Comic Jeffrey Ross's dancing turned out to be the biggest joke in his repertoire...

Actor Ted McGinley found out that his Happy Days were decades behind him...

Kim Kardashian learned that in the Ven diagram of public consumer blocs, there's very little overlap between DWTS voters and Playboy readers...

Misty May Treanor had a dream of going all the way, but her tendon snapped her out of it...

Who will be eliminated next?


This week, the performance night is down to a 90 minute program (after the marathon 2 hour episodes we've seen), so the pace has picked back up.

The Misty injury last week spared Rocco from elimination, but they wanted to make those scores count. So, they combined last week's results with this week's results to come up with the elimination. As you can imagine, this meant that all eyes were on Rocco to see whether he and Karina could cook something up that would wow judges and voting audience members alike.

In general, it seemed like most of the stars who racked up big numbers last week took it kind of easy this week. Brooke, Warren, and Maurice all posted significant drops with lackluster (for them) routines, while those in the danger zone (Susan, Toni, and Cloris) kicked it up a notch.



Most Surprising Performance came out of left field from Cloris, of all people. If you're not watching, let me sum up her performances to date: she has shown surprising physical abilities in terms of flexible legs and stamina. However, she hasn't really attempted anything that looks remotely like dancing, and has basically just goofed around while partner Corky tried to dance around her. But this week, Cloris put her mind to it and actually turned out a decent tango, to everyone's shock and awe. Measured against the other dancers, it wasn't very good. But measured against her previous showings? It was the biggest improvement I've ever seen in a single week.




Worst Outfit goes to Rocco, who has really been a bonehead about every decision he could possible make. He's got a pleasant personality, and no dance skills. So his outfit choice is a great way to build an image that will translate into votes. This week, he chose to wear a terrible pink monstrosity that culminated in baggy, ruffled tear-away sleeves. I guess he was going for sympathy votes?

Worst Insult was Rocco's shirt. Sorry to harp on this. But I felt really insulted that he expected me to watch him dance in it.

Here are the scores:

Brooke: 26 (-2)
Lance: 26 (+4)
Susan: 24 (+3)
Cody: 23 (+2)
Cloris: 22 (+6 = most improved)
Warren: 22 (-3)
Toni: 22 (no change)
Maurice: 20 (-4 = biggest slide)
Rocco: 18 (-2)

During the elimination night, they livened things up with some election ad parodies, in which the stars were impugned for a variety of fun reasons. "Why is Maurice Greene so happy all the time? Maurice Green. He thinks this competition is a joke. Paid for by Lance Bass." They captured the ominous tenor of the real smear ads pretty well.

For the first time they revealed an official bottom two. That turned out to be Rocco and Cloris, which might mean that Cloris' voting bloc has finally run out of steam (her support from votefortheworst.com may or may not have had an impact).

When the dust cleared, Rocco was eliminated to absolutely no one's surprise. I've never seen someone that seemingly fit and young dance so terribly for so many weeks. As much as I liked him (which was "somewhat"), I'm glad to get his elimination out of the way so that we can start to see some pressure put on the decent dancers. The only thing sad about the elimination is that the judges probably had some more cooking metaphors to use during their critiques.

And how did we do? Let's check...



The Standings

1st: Matt 989 (+50 +8)
2nd: Mike 985 (-10 +8)
3rd: Carl 966 (+50 +8)
4th: Experts 960 (-10 +0)
5th: Kim 906 (-80 +0)
6th: Lisa 892 (-30 +8)
7th: Dawn 891 (-40 +48)
8th: Rick 889 (-40 +8)
9th: Paul 848 (-10 +0)


Everyone except for Kim and Paul (and the Experts) got eight points for correctly predicting that Brooke would get the top score (she tied with Lance, so Lance would have also been an acceptable answer). Dawn was the only person to get Rocco right for BS, and her smart thinking earned her 40 big bonus points.

As far as the elimination goes, five out of nine people either got it right on the head (Carl and I), or off by only one (Paul, Mike, and the Experts). So, as a group, we were pretty accurate. Kim had the worst week of anyone, dropping a big 80 points after predicting that Rocco would take it all.

Good luck, everyone!