TeeMo

Suri is ALWAYS super defensive about Allison. Back during her disastrous season with Jonathan, she was defensive every week. She was thrilled last season because Riker made Allison look good. I understand that she likes her as a dancer but she does stick out on this show and not in a great way. I have no dance training and no dance eye and only know about ballroom dancing from this show and even I can tell that she does not do certain things the way they should be done. It shows. I think this season will be her first true test. Jonathan was a ball of energy who was hard to control and that came across in the dances. Riker was already trained in a lot of things she needed to teach him so he made her look good. Andy is somewhere in the middle. He has musicality and stage presence that Jonathan did not but he also doesn't have any ballroom training. I think we'll really get to judge her as a teacher based on her work with him moreso than in her first two seasons.

Bindi's video actually has more than 200,000 views - she is killing everyone else. Same with her Whip/Nae Nae video, it had something like 600,000 views. She was good last night but I am surprised by her seemingly vast popularity relative to everyone else.

Peta claimed that Andy asked for her by name but in his interview on Ryan Seacrest announcing he'd be on the show he definitely did not indicate that was the case. His description of their first meeting did not make it seem like he had any idea who Peta was before she walked up to him and introduced herself. I did think it was odd that she was not mentioned at all in his package and I am sure she was thrilled to hear Andy say "I got the best one! You're the best one!" when Allison walked into the room. I also did not miss Peta last night.

Andy was the celeb originally paired with Peta. They switched the pros around a bit when Peta dropped out. Anna was asked back at the last second so my guess is Allison was originally paired with Gary, they moved her to Andy when Peta dropped out and Alek was a last minute add so Lindsay got a promotion.

Agree with those who said the married couple schtick was old before it even started. I hope they lose that angle soon. Mark also seemed over it. The bad dancing was very, very bad. I didn't think anyone was very, very good but overall I think Tamar, Carlos, Alek and Bindi did the best. And Nick, I guess but that is to be expected. The gushing over Bindi was a bit much though. Can the wardrobe department work on getting some more supportive tops for the ladies on this show? Bindi and Alexa are both young but the tops of their costumes were woefully unsupportive and made them look matronly.

As disgusting as all of this is in general, I find myself even more enraged thinking about how he would have been repeatedly leaving Anna alone with all of his blessings to run around and sleep with other people.

Is it just me or did Nastia's waltz seem incredibly similar to Bethany's from last season? I know a lot of the dances are pretty redundant but that really stuck out to me. Though I must say that I did love Len's concept for it and found that aspect of it all to be very, very sweet.

Total viewers are up over Season 19 but the spring season is traditionally higher rated than the fall seasons so the TV ratings tracker sites tend to compare spring seasons to spring seasons and fall seasons to fall seasons for shows that run two cycles per year like DWTS. In that case, we'd be comparing to Season 18 and the ratings are down from that (Season 18 averaged 14.7 million viewers per performance episode, Season 20 is averaging 13.5 million viewers per performance episode). But the demographic share info is actually down this season from Season 19 despite having higher overall viewers (Season 19 averaged 12.76 viewers per performance episode.) For the 18-49 demo the share for the last 4 seasons were: Season 20 - 2.05 Season 19 - 2.13 Season 18 - 2.3 Season 17 - 2.2

It's hard to tell where all the chips will fall but I think Rumer and Riker are the two most in danger of going home tomorrow. It's too bad, the finals should be Rumer/Riker/Nastia. Convenient that Derek was cleared to do more significant dancing as soon as that Radio City show closed last week. I expect we've seen the last Sasha/Nastia dance for the season.

I thought Afterbuzz was kind of boring this week which is sort of understandable since the show was uneventful overall. The correct people went home, no one had a major disaster, the remaining couples danced well. Not a whole lot to say. I did appreciate Gleb talking about Allison's dances and how he thinks she is doing a good job but that she often seems to leave important elements of the dance styles out - this week her Viennese Waltz had no right turn which is apparently a pretty basic element that makes a Viennese Waltz a Viennese Waltz. I think all of the pros are likely guilty of this at different points but I think she seems to pretty consistently create these sort of contemporary/jazzy versions of the standard ballroom and Latin styles.

I was bummed that we didn't get a big old opening number tonight. I had hoped that we'd see more of them once the results show came back. Is Peta still even on this show? She danced for about 25 seconds last night and I didn't see her once tonight, even in the Red Room on All Access. It also would have been nice if they could time this show better to allow them to show the goodbye packages for the contestants. Tom made it sound like they had one for Chris but didn't have time to show it. I had flashbacks to Charlie White's elimination (well, except for the part where Chris was a terrible dancer). They had an extra hour this week and couldn't allow enough time for a quick goodbye package? I understand that Derek is still the pro here, blah, blah, blah but they couldn't let Sasha stand with them when they got their results or even show him on camera? He was backstage out of costume all night from what I could see. That is just silly.

Agreed. I thought Erin actually fawned over a bit in their red room interview tonight saying how hard it has been for Nastia all season with all the traveling and school, etc and tried to give Nastia a platform to address how she is feeling at everything right now but she gave yet another sort of bland, forgettable answer. I did watch a bit of their livestream last week and she seemed more personable there then she does on the live shows but I don't really think this is all Nastia being cast a certain way by the producers, it is just who she is. She is sort of "eh." Her personality is actually what I expected Meryl would be like before Season 18 started. I think it is just that years of elite athlete training turns you into a bit of a robot in interviews. And for all the talk about pimping of Val by the judges, etc, Nastia and Riker both have a higher cumulative number of points than Rumor and Nastia has been in either first or second place more than any other contestant so far this season.

The show's highest rated season overall was actually Season 12, the season he sat out. The ratings started their nosedive the following season (Season 12 had 22.4 million average viewers while Season 13 had 17.6 million average viewers), they had another big drop during the All Star Season and have since stayed relatively steady with the Spring seasons generally performing better than the Fall seasons. http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/showtracker/2011/05/dancing-with-the-stars-hits-its-highest-ratings-ever-even-without-bristol-palin-.html The ratings are on a slow, steady decline these days but that is true for TV shows across the board. Season 19 averaged around 12.76 million viewers. Things are up so far this season over Season 19 but down compared to Season 18, the last spring season. At any rate, I agree with you that Derek is a draw and the producers likely want to keep him around as much as possible but it is not true that the ratings suffered when he sat out. I think he has actually only missed that one season since joining the show in Season 5. He announced he was leaving the show after All Stars (Season 15) but then he came back for Season 16, much like this season. Sorry for veering slightly off topic - I am just interested in the ratings patterns of this show.

I wish I could like Riker more. Actually, I do like Riker, I just really dislike Allison and my dislike for her overpowers my like for him. I wish had had been paired with someone else. If there is any justice, some combo of Chris, Robert or Noah should go home tomorrow. I actually would rather another week of Chris over either of the other two at this point. I think. I am not sure that I really care which is how I feel about this whole season. Did Derek tell Nastia that she really gets useless when she gets tired in the package for the jive? Yikes.

I wonder what his respective contracts with the NY Radio City show and DWTS look like. I've been thinking that it would be a bit of a PR nightmare if he returned to one but not the other, though I tend to think if is only able to do one, the Radio City Show seems the more likely choice since it involves lots of money in ticket sales. I can imagine that it puts the group backing the Radio City show in a tough spot if they slide his understudy in for the rest of the run and then he shows back up on DWTS. I have no idea whether one gig is more taxing than the other so that would obviously be a factor as well. Maybe he could wait until the Radio City show closes in early May and try to come back for the last couple of weeks of DWTS. He has his own Move On Tour coming up this summer and if I were him, I'd probably take as much rest and rehab time as I could now rather than rushing back too fast and risking a more serious injury that could derail that tour.

Yikes, I just saw his Twitter exchange. People are rough. LOL

Looks like Team YOLO changed their Team Dance concept after Derek left LA and he won't learn it until Monday morning. Feels like a little bit of throwing Mark under the bus here should the dance not go well. http://www.tvguide.com/news/dancings-derek-hough-blog-week5/

I suspect that Rob Wade not only wanted that song to be performed but he wanted it performed by one of the more capable couples - hence we see Rumer and Val turning it down and Nastia and Derek ending up with it. I don't think someone like Chris or Suzanne were likely ever even given the option of using that song.

This week Derek has 2 shows a day at Radio City on Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday/Friday, 3 shows on Saturday and 2 shows on Sunday. I ready somewhere else that he and Nastia don't practice much on Tuesday anyway because she has class (my understanding is that he actually stayed in LA a day longer this week because he had meetings about his Move Tour on Tuesday). I realize that the shows themselves are only 90 minutes long but I imagine he must get to the theater a bit in advance and be there a bit afterwards as well - he is not showing up at 1:55 pm for a 2:00 show and walking out of there immediately at 3:35 when it is over. Where are they even squeezing practice in during a week like this? Aside from finding the actual time, isn't he exhausted? If he and Nastia manage to win this thing, I imagine him falling over in exhaustion when Tom hands them the mirrorball.

I think Maks is just hanging around the studio because he doesn't have much else to do (and I say this as a Maks fan). I think it's possible that he is coming in and looking at Val or Peta's dances and offering advice like he did in that one Janel and Val rehearsal package last season but I doubt that he is actively choreographing much. When they talked about this stuff on Afterbuzz last week, Anna specifically mentioned Mark, Derek and Val as current pros who she implied do it all themselves. In talking about the past she said that Louis, Maks, Tony (I think) and Jonathan used to trade off choreographing the intro group numbers and that she would offer her input sometimes. Wasn't there some talk that Karina helped Peta quite a bit with her freestyle in Donald Driver's season or am I getting cowboy themed freestyles mixed up and actually thinking of Cheryl and Drew?

They had been out to dinner with friends. The whole thing was very unclear. They played it up in their 1st package that they had been on this date and then he didn't call her for weeks or something but in later interviews Peta and James both said that all of it was a bit overblown. I honestly have no idea what the real story was there only that they did talk about their possible romance throughout the length of the show.

Riker and his siblings also all competed with a dance troupe called "The Rage." There are a ton of videos of them dancing on Youtube. In this one, Riker is wearing purple pants.

The definitely did do that with Peta and James. When his band came into rehearsals they had them awkwardly ask them if they were dating. And Erin asked them about it in a post dance interview too (cut to the 46 second mark):

Actually, yes, in ballroom. It was brief, but he and his sister danced together and competed in 2006/2007. http://www.dancesportinfo.net/Couple/Ryker_Lynch_and_Rydel_Lynch_46955/Details They seemed to compete in Latin dances but I still found it laughable that he said something like "Foxtrot? What's that?" in his package last night as if he hasn't been around ballroom dancers his whole life even if he's never done a foxtrot himself.

I know that Nastia doesn't need much, if any, handholding through this process but even still this whole scenario is a bit much. There has never been a similar situation where the "star" has to adjust their schedule to the schedule of the pro. Nastia knew what she was getting into when she signed on so I am sure she knew what to expect and being based in NY for part of the week is clearly important for her as well. But it does still seem like she is missing out on a bit of the overall process having to do her final practices with Henry while her partner jets into LA in the early hours of show day. Last week she left for LA on Friday and this week she was out of NY by Saturday as well, stopping in Las Vegas on the way. Derek has shows Wednesday through Sunday so they are not spending all that much time together in general. One of my favorite parts of this show is always watching the partnerships grow as the star and pro move through the season together and I wonder what their journey as a partnership will end up being. And hopefully someone buys Henry a nice thank you gift for all of his help.