This season of
Dancing with the Stars had probably the most emotional ups and downs than any other season to date. The celebrity dancers began their training in September, and it was entertaining and inspiring to see how far all of them came. Even
Mark Cuban, bless his soul, learned to loosen up and boogie down a little. A precious little, but he did make it further than
Wayne Newton in the competition. Read on to see what I thought were the highlights and lowlights of the fifth season of
Dancing with the Stars.
Highlight:
The semi-final performance show. The final four (
Helio Castroneves,
Jennie Garth,
Melanie Brown and
Marie Osmond) danced their hearts out in two incredible rounds that blew all of our socks off. Out of eight scores given that night, five of them were triple tens, and all of them deserved. Marie, in my opinion the only weak link among the final four, was the first to dance in both rounds, which meant that we were able to brush past her performances and concentrate on the other three dancers. It was a semi-final like no other.
Honorable mention:
Mel's dominatrix-inspired outfit for the paso doble during the seventh week of competition. Not only did she and
Maksim Chmerkovskiy receive a perfect score on this dance (their second out of five for the whole season), but her outfit was fantastically scary and sexy, as befits her popular moniker.
Lowlight:
The elimination of
Sabrina Bryan. Sabrina was arguably the most talented contender this season, but ultimately ended in a dismal seventh place. She and
Mark Ballas came back to dance in semi-final results show, to accompany Avril Lavigne's vocal performance, and again in the season finale, but to me, it felt like a small consolation prize. I would have loved to watch her face off against Mel B in the
Dancing with the Stars finals.
Honorable mention:
Richard Simmons' visit to Jennie Garth in rehearsal to give her a pep talk about how great she is and how she is such an inspiration to girls all across the country who suffer from low self-esteem. Excuse me? Sure, Jennie Garth might have recently played neurotic Val Tyler on
What I Like About You, but Jennie is a gorgeous woman and it's not likely that really angsty, unconfident teen girls feel any kinship to her. Also, Richard Simmons is too frightening for words.
Scariest moment:
Marie's collapse was a shocker that nobody saw coming. Just in case you haven't seen it yet, here is a video clip from that fifth week of competition when Marie collapses on stage while she is receiving her critiques for the samba. It was unnerving and very sudden, and ABC quickly cut to commercials. There are rumors these days circulated by TMZ that Marie faked her faint and, moreover, constantly had writers on hand just off-camera to feed her witty lines every week. While I won't comment on her being fed one-liners, I really can't believe that she would sink so low as to pretend to lose consciousness in order to gain the sympathy of the voting public.
-Debbie Chang, BuddyTV Staff Writer
Source: TMZ
(Image courtesy of ABC)
