DWTS Season 11, Week 9 – ‘Can DWTS right the ship’ Weekend Media Roundup

I wasn’t going to watch the final because I was so ticked over the unfairness of everything. But I am starting to look forward to it.

Can DWTS right the ship? Will Baby take the mirrorball? Will Kyle the underdog win it all? Or will Bristol (gasp) sink the whole show? TPTB (and the judges) have a chance to end the season with a positive bang – or not.

What else is on Monday and Tuesday nights anyway? I might find out come March. ~ PureDWTS Reader Laurie

LOL! I just loved that quote by Laurie yesterday and it says it all, doesn’t it?!! I still love this show despite the unfair eliminations, controversies, and whackiness this year.

And for all of the fans out there that are out there hating on the show and planning to boycott it now and never watch again since Maks got voted off or for whatever reasons (I can’t believe some of the tweets I’ve seen out there), this sure isn’t what Maks wants. Please listen to his words in this new interview on Access Hollywood. He still very much loves this show, he wants the best for it, and hopes to dance on it in the future. So, when you talk of boycotting it, do you realize you are hurting Maks, the other dancers, and future celebrities you might love to see dance when doing so? (Heidi’s Note: Better still watch, and vote for either Jennifer or Kyle and avoid a self fulfilling prophesy. Strategically, it would be safer to vote for whichever of them has the higher score, but take your pick.)

Here is another interview with Maks on The Insider discussing the voting system and the elimination. He hopes the system will be checked and more thought will be put into the show in the future for what’s best for it. I agree and I hope the producers will hear him and how many of us feel after what’s happened this Season.

The producer of Dancing With The Stars, Conrad Green, also speaks out on the voting system and Bristol. Here is what he told EW.com in a new interview.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: This week, there’s been a lot of outrage that it’s too easy to exploit the voting system at ABC.com. Do you have any plan in place to correct that?CONRAD GREEN: It’s already corrected, to be honest with you. It might appear that you can make up a thousand email addresses and send them in, but we have a number of security checks in place that go over all of the internet votes before they’re calculated. In this particular case, we can spot an IP address, and if one computer sends in a crazy amount of email votes, we just discard them. These things can happen for any of our contestants. It’s not like only Bristol’s fans could do that. It could just as easily be happening for Jennifer’s or for someone else’s. But either way, those excessive votes are not being counted.

Are you saying that it might look to people like their excessive votes are getting through, but because they’re using the same IP address the votes actually wouldn’t count?Exactly. And there’s a number of other security checks they can do. I’m not gonna reveal all of them, because it might encourage people to try to find a way around them. But there are tons of checks done by every one of our vendors — the phone people, the text people and the internet people. They do discard anything that looks suspicious. Sometimes people just can’t get through because the phone lines are busy; the local exchanges get overwhelmed. But that affects everyone equally. Unfortunately, it’s a huge country with a huge infrastructure, and those kinds of things are going to go wrong. Our servers have gone down on the internet during voting a lot. I’m very confident the votes that are getting through are valid.

Would you ever consider giving more weight to the judges’ scores in the future?You’ve watched the show for a long time, so you’ve seen every little brouhaha we’ve had along the way. With the amount of times people have screamed blue murder about the scores of the judges have given, do you really think the complaining would stop if the judges had the final say? What it comes down to is, we add the share of the judges’ scores each night to the audience’s votes. And if you look at the spread this week between Jennifer, who got 60, and Bristol who got 53, and the other two in between, I think the share Jennifer had of the judges’ vote was like only three and a half percent more than Bristol had. I think the share that Bristol had was only one and a half percent less than Brandy’s. So all Bristol had to do was get more than one and a half percent of the popular vote than Brandy, and then she’s through. That isn’t that surprising. I’m kind of mystified about why everyone is finding this such a bizarre thing to happen.

Do you think Bristol might win?Of course. She’s got the same chance as everyone else now. The slate has been wiped clean, every show. She’s improved every week. I think a lot of people are ignoring the fact that she’s actually a decent dancer. What I think is annoying people is that maybe she’s not as vivid a performer as some of the other dancers on the show. Kyle is quite a performer, but Bristol is probably in terms of technique a better dancer than Kyle. But she’ll never get credit for that. The thing is, when you look at her, she’s actually quite shy. Watching someone develop stage presence is actually quite fascinating to watch, and I think that’s why some people are rooting for her. You see her gradually unfolding and unfurling and all, as a performer. I can assure you that she’s really enjoying doing it. It’s not like she doesn’t want to be here. Far from it. I think she just feels uncomfortable with a lot of the things you see on our show — wearing tiny costumes, being over-the-top. She just feels slightly embarrassed doing it. She just doesn’t come from this world. I think that’s one of the things that’s absorbing about watching her.

So you think it’s just a case of America loving the underdog?
We have no way of knowing why people are voting for Bristol. If you look at it, young contestants on the show are always popular. Shawn Johnson won it. Kyle happens to be in the final as well, which everyone seems to have overlooked. You’ve got 19- and 20-year-olds in the show who have both made the final. People like young contestants, contestants who aren’t from the mainstream, who have got a tough story, who have come from no dance training. You’ll remember, this time last season, everyone was furious about Nicole being on the show because she’s got too much experience. There might be an element of her vote that’s from Republicans, but there might be an element of her vote she’s not getting because of Democrats. She was working at a dermatologist’s office in Alaska, whereas Jennifer Grey was in a movie beloved by millions of women around this country who are now our target audience. She hasn’t got any fan base to speak of. If there are a few Tea Party people getting behind her, how is that any different from Marie Osmond’s fans voting for her, or rodeo fans voting for Ty Murray, or Brandy’s fans — five million albums sold — who were voting for her? You could argue that [Bristol]‘s got no constituency. People are being melodramatic about this. If she was Kenny Mayne, yeah, that could be an issue. Or Kate Gosselin — with the quality of her dancing, that would be a bit bizarre. But she’s a good dancer, Bristol. I thought she did great on Monday. Here’s a 20-year-old girl who everyone’s screaming at. This should be the best week of her life. I really feel for this girl. Everyone’s acting like she’s getting together with Dick Cheney, trying to start an evil empire. It’s crazy. It’s a dancing competition. She’s a lovely girl. Give her a break!

A lot of fans are flipping out on the internet and insisting they’ll never watch the show again if Bristol wins. How do you respond to that?Unfortunately, people get pissed on this show. It’s the nature of it. Your favorite gets kicked off and you think it’s unfair. There’s a massive difference between “unfair” and “something else going on.” Life isn’t always fair. You could probably nominate the best dancer after only two shows — you might as well just stop the season right then. It’s about improvement, it’s about where people go. Bristol’s our most improved dancer. People threaten to leave the country if the next government wins the election. They tend not to. At the end of the day, they should be mobilizing their friends, getting their children to vote, talkimg about it in the office, you know? Make those calls. It’s a pretty easy process. It’s very easy to influence the results of this show if you’re passionate about it. The fans have always had a say in the past about who wins, and frequently someone wins who they don’t agree with. I haven’t always agreed with the person who’s won. Everyone has their favorites. That’s the nature of it. Get involved!

Heidi Adds: The article above is somewhat contradicted by what he says to Entertainment Tonight below, so, I’m inclined to think he’s referring to putting a stop to fake email addresses. He clearly doesn’t care about multiple valid emails – the abc.com site even implies you can do that.

Meanwhile “Dancing with the Stars” executive producer Conrad Green told the AP that there are security measures in place to detect abnormal activities like using fake email addresses, but that he doubts many people are doing it.

Green tells the AP that even if people could get around the voting rules, he says it’s still fair since fans of any of the dancers could do it. “I don’t think there’s any reason to believe our voting system is unfair,” Green told the news agency. “If someone really wants to sign up for a million e-mail addresses … well, so be it. But they could be doing that for Jennifer, they could be doing that for Kyle, they could be doing that for anyone.”

Speaking of Bristol, here is Brandy and Cheryl being interviewed on Access Hollywood at Us Weekly’s Hot Hollywood party about Bristol Palin’s chances to win, giving back, and if we’ll see Brandy on Tuesday night’s show.

Moving on to other news….and a little scary at that. According to Access Hollywood a Hazmat team was called into the “Dancing with the Stars’” offices on Friday evening after reps for the show received a package containing an unknown white powder substance. Thank goodness it turned out to be a harmless.

“An envelope containing an unknown substance was delivered to the ‘Dancing with the Stars’ production office on Friday evening,” a rep for ABC said in a statement to Access on Friday night. “Security and the Los Angeles Fire Department and Los Angeles Police Department were immediately notified. Measures were taken to secure the area and ensure the safety of personnel.”

After authorities arrived on the scene and investigated, they determined that the white powder was a harmless household item, the ABC rep added.

“Ultimately we were advised by the LAFD that the substance was determined to be talcum powder,” the rep’s statement concluded.

Ok, that wraps up this media post for your Saturday. Have a fun day for whatever you have planned out there.xxx