On 'Dancing With the Stars'

So a simple Wiki search tells me that in the past five years Dancing With the Stars has had ten seasons. That's ridiculous, but let's try to keep some measure of scale going in this discussion. Saying two seasons a year for five years is ridiculous when you refer to a show with contestants like Kate Gosselin, T.O. and Donny Osmond is like saying solar systems are really pretty big things.

Jump ahead.

The two most talked-about possible contestants for Season 11? Mike "The Situation" Sorrentino and political right-to-life disaster Bristol Palin.

Now as for The Sitch, that seems par for the tap-dancing course. He's hot right now, he's in shape and, frankly, he's Italian so his mother very likely demanded he learn how to dance in some way that isn't reminiscent of fucking his partner or beating the roof/floor of the club he's in to a bloody pulp with a clenched fist. Mike is clearly the most prolific 'character' to come out of The Jersey Shore. He's supposedly getting booked to the shows third season (for which the original casting agency was seeking new housemates), has a tongue-in-cheek guide to G-T-L ready to be published, and is on track to make $5M both this year and next. Truthfully, he's a great person to cast on a show only watched by the absolute dregs of mainstream pop-society.

But Bristol? Really? Yes, let's take a teen mother who is also the daughter of the most brain dead and incompetent political figurehead since Dan Quail and stick her on a show where three washed-up media clowns judge you by your ability to learn complex dance maneuvers in a short period of time despite no practical training.

On the other hand, let's look at this from a ratings perspective. I have no idea how Dancing With the Stars works. The only times I've seen it were in the background during the less-than thirty minutes or so between the ending of a good show on another channel and the start of whatever used to follow DWTS. Castle, I think. I know the idea is one celebrity and one classically trained dancer, but I think they do some exhibition stuff too, but I might just be hoping that because I really, really want to see The Situation get all "Dirty Dancing" with Bristol Palin. She's small. He can throw her around. And I feel like it could solve most of the social problems around the girl if The Sitch would just creep on her for like a month straight. Of course this would likely throw her mother back into the spotlight, but hopefully frothing at the mouth about knuckle-dragging Italians will finally kill her career and drive her back into whatever naked mole-rat hole she lives in nine months out of the Alaskan year.

I have a friend who will actually be forced to write about all this for his job. He is a pop-culture blogger type person. He says he can't believe this, but neither could he believe Kate Gosselin participating in the show. Honestly, I get that a lot quicker than I get Bristol Palin. She's only got one celebrity baby. Gosselin had eight. DWTS was probably the first time she got paid to be out of the house and away from the kids since Jon tried to bribe her out of taking sole custody. Eight weeks of aerobics class for $30,000 and daycare? Hell yeah.