Bricker, my remark was addressed mostly to the people who have been participating in this thread all along, not intended as the opening salvo in the next battle between liberals and conservatives.
Yes, I understand that the show is a popularity contest just as much as it is a dance competition. Yes, it’s fine that people were using multiple venues to vote. Yes, people can vote for whoever they want for whatever reasons they want.
That said, of the three people in the finale, Bristol was clearly the third-best dancer. God bless her for making it to the finale, but since it’s a dance competition as well as a popularity contest, I am happy that the best dancer of the three is the person who won.
Beyond that, I really would prefer not to get into a huge argument with you about this.
The suspense of the show was ruined for me when the aired Bristol’s first interview. Her comment about hoping she’d win because that would giving the middle finger to all the people who hate her and her mom.
That was such an crappy thing to say, I figured it was only aired so that the audience would lose sympathy for her - and not care that she wasn’t going to win.
The seven telephone lines are real, the multiple E-mail addresses are fake. If the rules are 5 votes per E-mail address, and you have real multiple E-mail addresses, I don’t think that would be cheating.
Actually, let me clarify something. I believe the intent is five votes per person, so while you would be following the letter of the law, you would be violating the spirit of the law.
Perhaps it’s the scope of the cheating? How many people have 7 legitimate phone lines? How many of those people will be putting their 35 votes against the email cheaters 300 votes?
If it’s 5 votes/email and someone has taken the time to create 60 email accounts and then register them all at ABC so they can vote, they deserve 300 votes. More power to them.
I do think ABC should have made them go through some kind of email verification thing (email to the person, click the link, verify the password, blah blah blah), but the network wasn’t requiring valid addresses which means what they did was ok according to the rule makers & enforcers.
This is not a reply to anything, but didn’t seem worth its own thread. But, over the course of the season, I came to hate Brook Burke. I am generally a mellow person and I will forgive a lot. But she just rubs me wrong; she makes me want to never watch again.
Fortunately, I can turn her off.
Unfortunately, that usually means I miss the scores.
If I were going to shoot my television during Dancing with the Stars it would be when she’s asking some STUPID QUESTION FOR THE SECOND TIME.
I mean, she’s got that little card in her hands at all time (to remind her what show she’s on?) Maybe she could just check off the questions as she asks them–not that anybody needs to ask them, but you certainly don’t need to ask them twice.
But then I think it’s not the question, it’s Brooke.
I don’t think ABC was prepared for the volume of online votes this season. This is the first time I’ve ever had difficulty logging in to vote in the morning. I try to vote around 6 a.m. eastern, when the west coast should’ve completely simmered down for the night and the east coast is more concerned about getting to work. That’s been my practice since the show began, but the last three weeks of this season, I had incredible difficulty just getting the website to respond to my login effort. The servers were swamped, the whole website crashed briefly after the finale. It was unprecedented.
My guess is that next season, the registration loophole is going to be closed.
For the record, since people were exploiting that loophole, I used the new Twitter connect feature to vote with all 4 of my Twitter accounts as well as my abc.go.com account for the finale, once I was finally able to log in. They’re all real, legit accounts, and I may be an outlier having (so many) multiple Twitters but so is Sally Quinn and her 7 phone lines, so. (And I’m sure that there are people who use their landline phone and their cell phone to vote by calling as well as by text and then vote online too, so it’s not entirely unprecedented.)
The best co-host the show has had, by far, is Drew Lachey, who filled in when Samantha was on maternity leave. I know that they think that they need a pretty woman co-host to counter Tom Bergeron, but if that’s the case, they need to get someone maybe from a show like Entertainment Tonight or Extra, who has TV presence and the ability to do tight patter in the interview segment.
Neither of those shows is live, though. Samantha left DWTS for The Insider, where she comes off as slightly less of an idiot – not because her skills have improved, but because she’s not required to respond to the moment, and they can ditch all the takes that don’t work. (When they show her onsite interviewing someone, she’s just as cardboard as ever.)