It's not just me

According to an article by Bill Carter in today's New York Times, the judging in the final episode of Dancing with the Stars was not fixed. That leaves temporary blindness or incompetence. But what's more interesting than that is the fact that Kelly would have won the last episode whether the judges gave her 10's or 1's. She had already won the audience vote, and that vote held more sway than the judges' vote.

The president of ABC Entertainment suggested that Kelly got a larger percentage of the audience vote because she appears in a soap opera. Duh. According to the article, "...Ms. Monaco took umbrage at that suggestion, saying she surely has had less exposure on television than Mr. O'Hurley, who was an occasional guest star (as J. Peterman) in the 1990's on the NBC hit comedy 'Seinfeld.'" Yes, let's compare the enthusiasm of fans of current soap operas with fans of a show that ran SEVEN YEAR AGO. 'Nuf said.

As the article states, "The network acknowledged that the outcome had offended a sizable portion of the show's audience." That would be anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of dancing, because the people I've heard from weren't offended by the audience vote (or at least weren't surprised by it) but by the judges' scores.

ABC is going to produce another installment in this series, and they're considering somehow announcing the audience vote before the next weekly installment. It's unclear to me how that would make any difference to the outcome. Are they going to have an episode whose sole purpose is to ditch one of the competitors? Apparently that's what they do on American Idol. Either way, ABC can expect to have a large audience for the next installment; this installment had the largest audience for a summer show since Survivor. I'll watch it even if it's judged by a box of rocks.

After you've taken umbrage, where do you store it?