“America’s Favorite Ballroom”
This evening DWTS kicked off its first couple of the season. Tonight’s #1 loser will join the likes of Tucker Carlson and Trista Rehn in the Dancing with the Stars Hall of Shame. The bottom two couples were a complete surprise to me: Paulina & Alec and Shandi & Brian. I can’t believe that Billy Ray Cyrus, Leeza Gibbons, nor Clyde Drexler were even in the bottom two. They must have some major fan support. So much for my predictions :). Neither of these couples did a great job last night but, there were definitely couples who I thought did much worse. In classic reality show fashion, I’m going to save the loser to the end of the article.

The show tonight was majorly padded with all sorts of extraneous segments like songs from Dionne Warwick, a dance number with 8 of the pros, and a bit by Jimmy Kimmel. Jimmy Kimmel was funny, I enjoyed it, but I’m not sure that the majority of DWTS fans will really get his style of humor. Maybe they’ll learn to love him. He is going to be back next week. Seriously. could ABC have plugged a few more things during the show? Let’s see, Dionne Warwick’s new album, Jimmy Kimmel’s show, and Donny Osmond’s new show “The Great American Dream Vote” (don’t ask). I think I prefer American Idol’s results show better, its only 30 minutes.

In the end the couple who won the all the expense paid trip home was Paulina and Alec. Paulina was extremely gracious. From her comments I gathered that she thought they did better than some of the other couples (and I’d agree) but that she just didn’t have the fan base that they did (again I’d have to agree). Next week, half of the couples will be dancing the Jive and the other half will perform the tango, a.k.a., the dance of love (you have to read that out loud with a Spanish accent in a deep voice). I’d make some early predictions, but I’m still smarting from this week’s.

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