Monday night's Dancing With the Stars was electric. It featured the season's first score of 40 and basically every single song from Grease. It also was the week in which Peloton's Cody Rigsby earned his highest score, of 32, with his partner Cheryl Burke. And while Cody is continuing to improve week after week, he still landed at the bottom of the leader board. And I've got to ask, with the competition shaking out the way it is... is Cody's best going to be good enough?
Cody's quickstep to "Go Together" from Grease was his best dance so far. And that's what we are looking for on Dancing With the Stars — improvement. With that said, I could watch Cody just stand there and do nothing and still be entertained. But this was very entertaining. However, his best still is having a tough time competing on the leaderboard. Does that matter, though?
Both Mel C. and Olivia Jade, who were in the bottom two on Monday night, received all nines from the judges. They were tied for third place with Melora, Suni, and Kenya. They both, as Len said, shouldn't have been in the bottom two. But despite her high scores throughout the weeks, Mel C.'s journey on the show ended after Len decided to save Olivia.
The voting process on DWTS does seem flawed. While both the judges scores and the audiences' votes are supposedly how the bottom two are selected, it's really based on a popularity contest. The audience voting ends right after the last dance, so it's almost as if you have to pre-vote for the couple you want to save (for example, Cody performed at the end of the night on Monday). For those on the west coast, you won't even see the stars/dances you are voting for until hours after you have to vote for them.
It seems that both the judges' scores and the audience votes are tallied as percentages and then added together. According to the Dancing With the Stars Wikipedia page, "the contestants' judges' shares are calculated as the percentage of the total number of points awarded to all contestants that evening. (For example, if a team earned 20 pts on a night when the judges awarded 200 pts, their judges' share would be 20/200 = 10%.) This percentage is then added to the percentage of North American votes received by each contestant." So if we take last nights judges scores....
- JoJo Siwa — 40
- Amanda Kloots — 39
- Melanie C — 36
- Melora Hardin — 36
- Olivia Jade — 36
- Suni Lee — 36
- Kenya Moore — 36
- Jimmie Allen — 34
- The Miz — 32
- Cody Rigsby — 32
- Iman Shumpert — 28
.... and add them together we get 385. If we divide Cody's score (32) by 385 we get 8.3%. This, plus the percentage of total votes, would give us his rank in the competition. We know the #PeloFam is coming in strong to keep him in the competition (myself included — I have never voted until this year) but this makes me wonder if this is enough? Once the bottom two are revealed, the judges cast their votes for who to save. If Cody hits the bottom two, there is a high chance he will be going home just based on the way the judges have been scoring him.
So moral of the story is... y'all better be voting 10 times. Period.
Images: ABC