‘Dancing With The Stars’: Can Show Come Back Strong After Season 27 Debacle


Dancing with the Stars will return in the fall of 2019 after a one-year hiatus from ABC, and fans are hopeful the show will reboot and rectify some of the issues that plagued its voting system throughout the course of the show’s 27th season on ABC.

The show normally aired twice a year, once in the fall and once in the spring. This was the first time since DWTS’ humble 2005 beginnings that the show would take a yearlong hiatus from its scheduled programming. Fans took it personally that some of the most qualified dancers of the show’s 27th season were eliminated in favor of radio personality Bobby Bones, who would take home the show’s mirrorball trophy alongside his pro, Sharna Burgess.

Per MSN, many viewers were irate at the couple’s win, taking to Facebook where one viewer penned the following statement, echoed by many of the show’s fans.

“Sorry total FARCE!! and an insult to everyone to give Bobby Bones the trophy. This is no longer a dance contest but a fan contest. Either give the judges 100% of the decision for the semi-finals and the Finale or the show is done for good.”

It was a season of simmering resentment towards the show’s voting system from fans, who saw favorites such as Milo Manheim (with Witney Carson), Evanna Lynch (with Keo Motsepe), and Alexis Ren (with Alan Bersten) be eliminated in favor for a competitor who had more personality than technique.

Earlier in the season, the elimination of Juan Pablo di Pace also created ire amongst fans, who were enraged the Fuller House star was sent packing after earning his fifth perfect score of the season. Newsday reported the actor was “gracious” but fans were not, calling for a revamp of the show’s voting system on the show’s official Twitter and Instagram pages.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYgvBvGaxqA

Entertainment Tonight reported that this season also hosted another technical glitch. Moments before one episode’s scheduled elimination, due to a technical glitch in the voting systems, none of the phone-in votes from this week were counted, leaving only the judges’ scores and online voting. This led to the double elimination of Alpine skier Danelle Umstead and actor/singer John Schneider.

Fans are hopeful that the show will be able to revamp its voting policies and find a way to cap votes for celebrities to make their wins or eliminations a fair representation of fan votes. GoldDerby came up with a list of ways to fix the voting, which in recent seasons, appears skewed in favor of particular contestants despite their dance abilities.

One way would be to have the judges’ scores account for more, making the split from the professionals to fans 75-25, instead of the 50-50 split the show employs now. Another way to help struggling favorites would be to actually show those who are really in the bottom two for fan votes, said GoldDerby, instead of throwing a high-scoring favorite in the mix to build anticipation for fans that they could be chopped.

Finally, a Judge’s Save, as they use on The Voice, would keep a couple longer on the show as designated by a professional dancing judge, and put the idea in the heads of viewers that perhaps that duo should be voted for in the future since the judge’s believed they were worth saving.

Dancing with the Stars will return to ABC’s primetime schedule in the Fall of 2019.

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