When only four percent of scripted TV shows feature LGBT characters, what’s a gay girl to do? Why, strap on your gay goggles and watch TV along with us, of course! Our handy appraisal scale is better than any old letter grade. Other sites A+. We say, “What about our lezzy-lady feelings?”
s I mentioned in yesterday’s video highlights, this week Dancing with the Stars tried to eat our souls by going after theme songs from beloved films. Low blow, Dancing with the Stars. Low blow. I would have forgiven them had either Nancy Grace or Rob Kardashian been made to dance out The Bridge on the River Kwai, but no such luck.
AfterEllen Bait
In a distressing turn of events, Hope Solo, usually our rock in this category, was all covered up in a toy cowgirl outfit. I’ll say it again: this is a woman who will commit to deranged costuming. She’s got moxie, that one.
It was also suddenly apparent that Solo is sweetly adorable in braids. I was nervous about typing that, because something tells me that if I said that in her presence, she might slug me, but there it is. Also? The length of one of the beeps in her rehearsal footage proved that the Solo really knows how to swear. I know that many people out there don’t find skilled and vigorous swearing attractive in a woman, but those people are wrong.
Chynna Phillips‘ dance didn’t go so well, but she did a fine job with the AfterEllen baiting. The thigh holster was an especially nice touch.
Kym Johnson looked smashing in her paso doble with David Arquette. I bet dancing that close to the edge keeps you in top form.
And Cheryl Burke was inexplicably wearing a harem outfit for her Superman-themed dance with Rob Kardashian, but she wore it very well. I can only assume that it was some sort of elegant, coded cry for help.
Feelings, Feelings, Feelings!
Goodness gracious, there were some genuine, spontaneous feelings this week. Cher was in the audience, and she was so tearfully happy and proud of Chaz Bono that she made me get all misty too. I defy you to watch her reactions without doing the same. It was just great.
And, as mentioned above, we got to see some rehearsal footage of Hope Solo that suggests she is just the tiniest bit intense when she’s working on something and doesn’t quite have it down. And then when Mandatory Cranky British Judge Len suggested that she, of all things, wasn’t working hard enough, she stayed perfectly, perfectly controlled and didn’t even swear.
OK, she did spontaneously develop laser vision and send several chandeliers crashing to the floor and maybe pulled a Carrie on 16 or 18 rows of floorboards, but in terms of her own personal composure, she was perfectly controlled.
Send good thoughts and protein bars to her partner Maksim next week. He’s going to need them.
Athletic Spectacle
Hey, the celebrity dancers are starting to step it up! David Arquette and Kym Johnson had some impressive lifting and dragging during their Raiders of the Lost Ark paso doble, and Carson Kressly and Anna Trebunskaya had pirate swordplay and they did a sort of spin-drag thing on the floor! I’m calling that move a Swiffer. Carson and Anna also had a twelve-foot-tall stuntman named Storm come in to teach them how to fight. Holy buckets.
Chaz and Lacey Schwimmer did a Rocky-themed number that was great fun and ended with a triumphant run up a flight of stairs — especially impressive for a guy whose knees have been betraying him for the past two weeks. The crowd got a workout of their own in when they leapt up for a standing ovation.
As for The Troupe, former DWTS champion Julianne Hough returned on Results Night to promote her remake of Footloose, apparently because there were still a few tattered shreds of movies I enjoyed as a kid left. That said, she and the Troupers did some great show-off-your-best-trick dancing.
Later in the show, Hough and her brother Derek did a high-energy jumpy, flippy, spinny brother-and-sister dance number and made it all the way through without getting, you know, creepy.
Well, almost all the way through.
The Troupe also did a movie theme medley on competition night, featuring a Star Wars sequence in which only the boys got to jump around with lightsabers. You and your antiquated gender roles can bite my Dagobah system, Dancing with the Stars.
Fighting Monsters
Least surprising news of the week: Bruno the Judge Who Needs You To Know He Has Had Sex is still appalling. Oh, and he liked the ending to the Psycho dance in which Ricki Lake got stabbed way too much. As of this week, Bruno moves up to the #5 spot on my list of People with Whom I Do Not Wish to Be Trapped in an Elevator.
Rob Kardashian is still a nightmare. He’s still trying to work the angle of how he is secretly terribly sweet and shy and just puts on this character of an arrogant, entitled jerkbag because it’s so very appealing on television. And he is just like Superman because of that! Kardashian also continues his immensely charming habit of whining about how people don’t seem to give him any respect just because he has never held a job or tried to, with the exception of whining about how he should pointlessly be on television some more.
That is why the invading Martians will one day destroy us. That right there.
But it’s Nancy Grace who lurched her way back into the front runner spot for America’s Next Top Monster, barely breaking a sweat as she ruined Flash Gordon and wiped the mangled residue of countless children’s dreams from her slavering jaws.
Grace has apparently decided that her continued presence on the show is due to the fact that America is finally falling in love with her spunky, rageball appeal. So she’s appearing in little interstitial skits so everyone can see how fun and down-to-earth she is, only in almost all of those skits, she’s exactly as caustic and mean as she is on her show.
Which is still on, so maybe she’s right. God knows no one has ever accused me of knowing What the American Public Wants. But it can’t be this. It just can’t. The least upsetting thing she did this week was look minxishly at the camera while pretending to comb her partner Tristan’s chest hair.
She must be stopped.
KICKED OFF THIS WEEK: Chynna Phillips
Great burrowing stenchmonsters, WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS SHOW AND THE VOTING AND THE WHOLE ENTIRE WORLD?!
There were three pairs in jeopardy: Chynna and Tony, Rob and Cheryl, and Nancy and Tristan. We had a 66% chance of getting one of the monsters off this show, and yet somehow they both remain to gnaw at our brain stems for another week.
Madness! Madness!
But somehow we must all carry on, even though we now know that the universe is a foul and menacing place that is neither ordered nor just.
We’ll get through this together. Chaz, Hope, and Carson are still on, so there must still be glimmers of decency and meaning in the universe. Somewhere.
We will pick ourselves up, brush ourselves off, and swear like Hope Solo. And then we will go forth and dance.
